Sarah was his only child, and in the weeks that preceded her return home from her first semester at college, Jackson could think of little else than going for a run with his daughter. Somehow, his mind had distilled the success or failure of the entire Christmas vacation down to whether or not his girl would go for a jog in the woods with him. Running was their thing. From age thirteen Sarah had run with Jackson twice a week in the mornings, out in the woods behind the house. Considering the way she looked now, it was strange that at first Jackson had encouraged her to come along only to satisfy her mother, who thought the girl ought to lose weight. “Exercise will do her good,” Jackson had been told, and in the end these words had proved correct. As a high-schooler Sarah had played soccer and field hockey, varsity all four years. By the time she’d left for college, the morning runs had become little more than a test of Jackson’s ability to keep up. He wanted, nonetheless, to do it again; the memory of cramps and wheezing can sweeten over time.
Pittsburgh was having a mild winter that year, and so the running paths were dry. Jackson’s only concern was that Sarah might not be interested in running with him anymore. In truth, he had nothing to support this fear, aside from the memory of how little he’d wanted to spend time with his parents after his first three months away from home. He knew already that he wasn’t going to ask Sarah to do it; asking would make it awkward. He’d wait for her to ask him, and melt with pleasure if she did.
Sarah hadn’t been home for twelve weeks; she’d not even come back for Thanksgiving. Jackson was not sure at all if this fact bode well or poorly for his Christmastime agenda. What really worried him was that the reason for Sarah’s absence had been a boy. Barry. Jackson half-expected the little prick to show up-SURPRISE!-holding hands with Sarah in the airport. ‘After all,’ Sarah would say, ‘I spent Thanksgiving with Barry! It’s only fair if he comes here for Christmas!’ Helen would agree with this analysis. Helen was Sarah’s motherand Jackson’s wife-and she always did whatever she could to piss Jackson off.
Barry.
Sarah came off the plane alone. She and Helen and Jackson went for dinner at an old Italian place they’d known forever in the city. They ate quickly and left without even looking at the dessert menu, because Sarah wanted to get home as soon as possible so that she could meet up with her friends from high school. At the house, she went straight upstairs to her room to change her clothes and announce her homecoming over the phone. Meanwhile, Jackson and Helen sat at the kitchen table and had strawberry ice cream, in separate bowls.
In late September, Jackson had nearly drowned in a clich?. Home from work early one afternoon, he’d come upon Helen-spread out on the floor of the master bedroom like a worshipping Muslim-letting some unknown, hairsprayed kid give her the goose from behind. The kid, who’d had a tattoo of Australia on his ass and couldn’t have been more than twenty, said nothing. Helen had said this:
“Jesus! You never fucking knock anymore!”
The word ‘sorry’ had floated from Jackson’s mouth as he’d backed out of the room, realizing that from that moment forth it would always and forever be within the realm of his capabilities to sketch-freehand-a map of the great island of the kangaroo. The outline of Australia, tragically quivering, had been burned onto the retina of his mind.
How original it had all been: the husband comes home from work to find … the wife … accompanied … by another man! Jackson’s life was ordinary even as it self-destructed. Standing there at the threshold of his bedroom, his mouth hanging wide and his wife sweating on the floor far beneath him, Jackson had been momentarily comforted by the thought that nothing so conventional could be real.
What was just as bad as the sight of his wife with Australia Boy was that – after the fact on that fateful day – Jackson had been unable to come up with anything meaningful to do. It had seemed to him that his life must have just been thrust upon on a pivot; don’t big things come from finding your wife in such a state? And yet, even straining, he could not hear the creaking hinge. There was only silence. After fleeing the house, cuckolded, he’d gone to a diner out on the highway to drink coffee. When this activity had proved insufficiently dramatic, he’d crossed the street to a gas station and bought a pack of cigarettes, even though he never smoked. After a tobacco-soaked hour back at the diner he’d headed home, having decided finally that he’d given Australia Boy enough time to finish up and leave the house.
Jackson didn’t like strawberry ice cream very much, and so when he saw that Helen’s bowl was empty, he pushed what was left of his towards her. She dug into the mash, and, holding her spoon like it was full of hot soup, took a dozen tiny licks off the top. Helen had not looked Jackson in the eye all night. He cracked a knuckle and cursed the infuriating powers of his wife.
Shortly, Sarah came downstairs and into the kitchen. She had indeed changed her clothes; her airplane and restaurant attire-sweatpants and a turtleneck-had been exchanged for a navy blue sweatshirt the size of a garbage bag and a pair of paint-stained jeans she hadn’t worn for years.
“I’ll see you guys later,” she said, moving towards the door.
Jackson was relieved to see that his daughter was wearing so many clothes. In her last years of high school, she’d gotten in the habit of going out at night wearing not much more than an unrolled napkin tied across her chest. “And here I was thinking,” he called out to Sarah’s back and shoulders as they slid through the doorway, “that there was going to be a horrible moment wherein I tried to assert my decreasingly legitimate authority by attempting to regulate your wardrobe.” Sarah turned around and smiled, and Jackson’s chest ached. Twelve weeks had taught him what a neat trick it was to say or hear anything meaningful over the phone with a bunch of kids howling in the dorm-room background. He smiled back at Sarah.
“I can probably regulate myself,” she told him. She paused, and perched for a moment up on her toes. “You’d be surprised.”
“I’m sure,” Jackson said.
Anyway, see you guys later,” Sarah said. “Don’t-you know. Don’t wait up.”She gave a little wave, they gave a little wave, and then Jackson and Helen were alone in the kitchen. The strawberry ice cream was melting, and Helen went to bed.
Jackson stayed at the table and wondered if it was obvious to his daughter that things at the house had changed. In early October, a month before Sarah had announced that she would not be coming home for Thanksgiving, Jackson had left the house and moved into an apartment complex ten minutes away. Orchard Hills. Jackson lived in building D, apartment 4A. It had only three rooms and a kitchen, but there was a community area across the parking lot with a pool and a barbecue grill. So it was OK.
When Jackson had gone to live in Orchard Hills D-4A he’d agreed with Helen that he’d temporarily move back into the house whenever Sarah came home for vacations. All things considered, living such a lie seemed to be a generally fair and quite considerate thing to do for their daughter.
It had been Jackson’s decision to move out of the house, and the choice had had little to do with Australia Boy, strictly speaking. The real problem was that Helen seemed to have lost her mind. She would not even discuss what had happened that day on the bedroom floor. It wasn’t that Jackson wanted to talk about it every night at dinner, but he did think Australia Boy ought to have been the topic of at least one angry, bloodletting conversation. Helen’s non-negotiable position was that her dalliance on the carpet had been of only slight significance. “As if that’s really what we ought to be talking about,” she’d say. “As if that’s what this is about.” Anytime Jackson tried to bring any of it up, she rolled her eyes and laughed him off. Gradually Jackson came to understand that he was expected not to mention his wife’s infidelity. When this expectation proved overly burdensome, he left.
Jackson sat for hours at the kitchen table, stirring the strawberry puddle in his bowl back and forth again. There was a TV on the counter next to the banana basket, and thirty seconds after Helen had gotten up, he’d turned it on and watched the end of an old movie about a British family from the 18th century that had discovered buried treasure underneath the servants’ quarters. After that there was the news and the late shows, and then another movie. It was about a bunch of black kids in a city. Jackson watched with interest. He was white and had gone to boarding school in New Hampshire from age twelve; movies about black kids in cities usually grabbed his attention in the same way that cowboy and Indian flicks had when he was a boy.
Eventually the movie ended. The next one was no good, but he stayed in the kitchen and kept the TV on anyway. Soon he realized that he was trying to keep awake until Sarah got home. He didn’t know why he was doing this – or what he thought he ought to say to her when she came in – but here he was, drinking cokes and making coffee and snapping a rubber band against his forehead every five minutes to stay awake. The night had become for him a test of endurance; he wondered if his plan was to tell Sarah about his marriage.
At 2:30, Jackson was thinking about the way his mother used to keep jelly at the back of the refrigerator when-finally-he looked up and saw Sarah standing before him in the flickering blue light of the TV. Her appearance was a shock. The garbage-bag sweatshirt and the bathroom-painting jeans were gone. Her hair was down, her face made up; her pants were black and tight. And now she had on one of those napkin shirts. Her lips and eyelids looked shiny, wet.
Would you like some ice cream?” he found himself asking.
“You shouldn’t eat ice cream late at night, Jack.” Sarah sighed and collapsed in the chair across from her father. Her face was white, and her eyes were shut.
Are you drunk?”
“Yeah.” Sarah touched her forehead to the tabletop and kicked her feet out wide, wrapping them around adjacent legs of the table. “But I already threw up out by the flower bed when Karen dropped me off, so I’ll feel better soon.”
“Let’s get you upstairs.” Jackson stood and moved towards her, offering his hand. Sarah growled.
“No. It’ll make me throw up again.”
“Sarah, you should really get to bed.”
“Dad, I’m a drinker. This is nothing.” Sarah snarled. “I’m fine.”
“OK.” Jackson sat back down. “Water, then?”
“No.” Sarah was breathing heavily. It looked to Jackson like she was going to be sick, regardless of whatever evacuations had taken place outside upon the flower bed. Sarah exhaled deeply, letting the air flap through her lips, and then she drew her knees up underneath her chin. “You’ve never seen me drunk before, have you, Jack?”
“Uh. No.”
“Jack. Son. Jack. Son. Jackson. Jack. Son. Was your dad named Jack, Jack?”
“No.”
“He was Frank.”
“Yes.”
“He was named Frank what nice name Frank!”
Even as this dialogue trickled out into the world, even as Sarah slumped lower and lower in her chair and made less and less effort to punctuate her sentences, even as Jackson’s mind raced around the question of whether or not to force Sarah to go upstairs to bed-even while all this happened, he found himself wondering if this was what Sarah planned to do to herself all twenty-six nights of her vacation. If it was, Jackson knew, it would be a sunrise certainty that Sarah wouldn’t ever be in any condition for an early morning run. Of course they could go in the afternoon, if they had to. But the morning was so much better.
“It was awesome, Jack,” Sarah announced. She nodded her head slowly.
“What was?”
“Tonight.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Crazy. Ugghhh.”
“Where did you go? I didn’t know it was possible to have so much fun around here.”
“We went to Grady’s.” Grady’s, Jackson knew, was a downtown bar as subtle as a Soviet hockey locker. “There were like a thousand people there,” she told him. “And girls were dancing on the bar – “
“You danced on the bar?”
“Not really.” Sarah made a thumbs-up with each of her hands, and touched her fists to her temples.
Helen would be irritated with him in the morning, if she found out he’d let Sarah sit here in the kitchen like this and moan. ‘You should have woken me, Jackson!’ That’s what she’d say. Then she’d burn his eggs. Sarah was still talking. “You should have seen it, Dad. You should have seen it. Huge crowd dancing … it was … it was … it was really hot in there.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” Sarah giggled, and had to steady herself against the table. “Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. It was a sight, Dad. It was like a movie.”
“Right.” Jackson said nothing more, and reached across the table to rub his daughter’s hand. He wanted to take her up to bed. At his touch, Sarah suddenly seemed to realize where she was, what she was doing, and why she might have reason to desire herself to be someplace else.
“Gotta go,” she mumbled, dragging herself to her feet. She staggered upstairs. Jackson wondered if he ought to go after her, to make sure she was alright, but he didn’t want to make her snarl again, and so instead he sat at the table, indecisive, and fell asleep. The TV was still on, Sarah’s perfume hung in the air, and the strawberry ice cream remained half-uneaten and melted in its bowl.
It was about an hour later that Helen came downstairs and woke Jackson up in the kitchen. “What are you doing down here?” she asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. She turned off the TV and carried the ice cream dish to the sink. “I came down for some milk,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Oh.”
“They say milk’s good for that.”
“Right.” Jackson had closed his eyes again and he did not say anything.
Helen poured herself a glass of skim and drank it. “What are you doing down here?” she asked again.
“Just watching TV.”
“You were asleep.”
“Yeah.”
Helen took a swig of milk and stared at her feet. Then she looked up, grinning and embarrassed. “You know,” she said. “I forgot, just now.”
“You forgot?”
“I woke up and I came down here and I forgot,” she said.
“About what?”
Helen’s hand hung loose from her wrist and she swung it back and forth. “You know,” she said. “About … us and …”
Jackson nodded, as though he understood, and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. It seemed to him that an apology was about to be issued, but he couldn’t decide who was supposed to issue it. He looked at Helen, whose eyes had swung back down to the ground. She was pensive; her head rocked slightly, and she looked to be sharing a joke with herself. Helen was wearing a turtleneck, as usual; she refused to sleep in short sleeves. She also refused to wear pajamas or bathrobes. Thus it was that all she had on besides her turtleneck was underwear. Jackson watched his wife, standing there in the hard hospital light of the fridge, and thought about her body. Helen had looked comfortable and fluid underneath Australia Boy, and Jackson wondered-not for the first time-if she’d ever once looked that way under him.
He got up and went towards her, wanting to do something, something small-right there and right then-that she’d remember, something that might make this night more than merely the night that Sarah came home drunk to babble at her dad. Helen patted him on the shoulder, smiled, and tried to push past him to the stairs, but he grabbed her by the arm and held her, smiling like a drunk himself.
The sink was within reach, and Jackson picked the spoon out of the bowl of ice cream and raised it slowly to Helen’s mouth, which parted in a smile. “Hungry?” he asked. They both laughed. Jackson was delirious with the momentum of improv. Helen slurped the ice cream off the spoon, and Jackson fed her again.
And then she rubbed his calf-just for a second-with her toes.
“Did Sarah come home?” she asked sternly.
“No.” Jackson gave her another spoonful.
“And just what do you think you’re doing?” she asked. She chuckled and looked Jackson in the eye the way she always did when delivering a mock accusation. “This is just like a movie.”
Jackson thought of Sarah, upstairs in bed, and backed away from Helen. “What does that mean?”
Helen shrugged. “Like a movie,” she said. “You know? It’s like a moment. Like a movie.”
“What?”
“You’re being … I don’t know, you were being like Richard Gere or something.”
“I’m Richard Gere?”
“Yeah.” She closed the distance between them and took the spoon from his hand, tossing it in the sink. “Don’t worry. It doesn’t mean anything.” She bit her lip in a way that made it clear that what she had on her mind was biology; that she had, for the moment, forgotten about Orchard Hills D-4A. She rubbed his calf again.
“What do you mean, ‘like a movie’?” Jackson asked, backing away. He frowned, almost grimaced, and now the room went cold.
“God, what’s the problem?”
Jackson scratched his head.
“What just happened?” Helen asked, spreading her arms out at her side. There had been a whisper to her voice before; now it was gone. Her toes were back down on the floor, and Jackson sensed from his untouched calves all the way up to his skull that now he stood alone. There was no more mist in the room. Jackson said nothing, and Helen shrugged. She pushed past him.
“People just say that, you know? It’s just a thing people say,” Helen mumbled, on her way to the stairs.
“Yeah, I know people say it.” Jackson checked the clock. “Sarah just said it to me an hour ago.”
Helen spun around to look at him again, her hand already on the banister. “What, you were lying to me before? You said she wasn’t home yet.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“I said no!”
“Did you talk to her?”
“What does it mean, ‘like a movie’?”
Helen crossed her arms and looked at the floor. She rocked back on her heels, obstinate now. “Don’t you feel like that sometimes, like things are just like a movie, just for a minute? Haven’t you ever had that feeling?”
“I think it’s a ridiculous thing to say.”
“I don’t know.” Helen’s obstinacy faded fast; she spoke again. “Sometimes things are so perfect, or just so perfectly wrong, you know? It’s like a movie. It’s like things are interesting enough, just for a second, that people might like to watch.”
Jackson followed his wife to bed and slept next to her in sweatpants, according to the arrangement they’d agreed upon the week before.
At nine-thirty the next morning, six hours after she’d gone to bed, Sarah went into her parents’ bedroom and whispered in Jackson’s ear to wake him up. As an explanation for her intrusion, she held up his running shoes and a pair of clean white socks. Jackson gently pushed Helen’s head from the nook between his arm and chest and left her sleeping, curled around the imprint of his body in the mattress.
There was a whiteness to the air that morning. Everything was crystal. Jackson and Sarah were both so exhausted from the night before that neither of them could run very fast; for the first time in a long time Jackson had no trouble keeping up. They didn’t talk much once their first conversation – about the group of hung-over girls with whom Sarah went running every weekend morning – had petered out, and so Jackson concentrated mostly on the light glimmering through the trees and on the smell of the earth and of his own body as it pounded through the woods. When they emerged from the forest and headed down the slope towards the back door of the house, both Jackson and Sarah began to run faster; they raced one another all the way to the bottom. They were neck and neck for a while, but then Sarah pulled away. Before she did, however, Jackson had a chance to enjoy the sideways sight of her huffing alongside him, beating her legs against the ground, a little girl once again. There was a whiteness to the air that morning, and though he wasn’t sure just how, it all seemed plucked from a moment he’d seen someplace before.
