Ordinary People by Judith Guest
“I can‘t!” he cries. “I can’t!” He drops his head on his arms. “You keep at me, make me talk about things I can’t talk about, I can’t!”
“Is that what you came here to tell me?”
He lifts his head, holding himself tight. Control. Control is all. He tries to clamp his throat shut over it, to stifle the sound, but he cannot and he begins to sob, a high, helpless coughing sound. There is no control any more, everything is lost, and his body heaves, drowning. His head is on his arms again, the smell of old wood is in his nostrils, the warmth of his own breath against his face.
“Ah, God, I don’t know. I don’t know, it just keeps coming, I can’t make it stop!”
“Don’t, then.”
“I can’t! I can’t get through this! It’s all hanging over my head!”
“What’s hanging over your head?”
“I don’t know!” He looks up, dazed, drawing a deep breath. “I need something, I want something—I want to get off the hook!”
“For what?”
He begins to cry again. “For killing him, don’t you know that? For letting him drown!”
“And how did you do that?” Berger asks.
But it is coming from some part of him that is separate and unknown. He is helpless against it, hits his fist hard against the desktop. “I don’t know, I just know that I did!” Head cradled on his arms again, he sobs. Cannot think, cannot think, no way out of this endless turning and twisting. Hopeless.
“You were on opposite sides of the boat,” Berger says, “so you couldn’t even see each other. Right?”
He nods his head as he sits up. He scratches his cheek, staring at Berger through the slits of his eyes. The itching creeps downward, under his pajama top.
“And he was a better swimmer than you. He was stronger, he had more endurance.”
“Yes.”
“So, what is it you think you could have done to keep him from drowning?”
Tears flood his eyes again. He wipes them roughly away with his hand.
“I don’t know. Something.”
It is always this way. His mind shuts down. He cannot get by this burden, so overpowering that it is useless to look for a source, a beginning point. There is none.
“You don’t understand,” he says. “It has to be somebody’s fault. Or what was the whole goddamn point of it?”
“The point of it,” Berger says, “is that it happened.”
“No! That’s not it! That is too simple—”
“Kiddo, let me tell you a story,” Berger says. “A very simple story. About this perfect kid who had a younger brother. A not-so-perfect kid. And all the time they were growing up, this not-so-perfect kid tried to model himself after his brother, the perfect kid. It worked, too. After all, they were a lot alike, and the not-so-perfect kid was a very good actor. Then, along came this sailing accident, and the impossible happened. The not-so-perfect kid makes it. The other kid, the one he has patterned his whole life after, isn’t so lucky. So, where is the sense in that, huh? Where is the justice?”
“There isn’t any,” he says dully.
Berger holds up his hand. “Wait a second, let me finish. The justice, obviously, is for the not-so-perfect kid to become that other, perfect kid. For everybody. For his parents and his grandparents, his friends, and, most of all, himself. Only, that is one hell of a burden, see? So, finally, he decides he can’t carry it. But how to set it down? No way. A problem without a solution. And so, because he can’t figure out how to solve the problem, he decides to destroy it.” Berger leans forward. “Does any of this make sense to you?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know.”
“It is a very far-out act of self-preservation, do you get that, Con? And you were right. Nobody needs you to be Buck. It’s okay to just be you.”
“I don’t know who that is any more!” he cries.
“Yeah, you do,” Berger says. “You do. Con, that guy is trying so hard to get out, and he’s never gonna be the one to hurt you, believe me. Let him talk. Let him tell you what you did that was so bad. Listen, you know what you did? You hung on, kiddo. That’s it. That’s your guilt. You can live with that, can’t you?”
He cannot answer, does not have an answer. He leans back against the chair. He feels as if he is seeing Berger through a curtain of mist. The air shimmers between them. He is lightheaded, his bones fragile, without substance, like scraps of paper.
“The thing that hurts you,” Berger says, “is sitting on yourself. Not letting yourself connect with your own feelings. It is screwing you up, leading you off on chases that don’t go anywhere. You get any sleep last night?”
He shakes his head.
“How about food? You had anything to eat since yesterday?”
“No—” He starts to say that he is not hungry, that he is too tired to eat, but Berger is on his feet and heading for the door, and he stumbles along behind him, unable to voice a protest, down the stairway and out into the street, dragged along by the force and flow of Berger’s monologue.
“Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it’s damn hard to smile.”
The restaurant is called Nick’s. The lettering is spread, in red, block letters, across the front window. It has a dirty, neglected look about it, but inside it is clean and warm and cheerful. Berger picks out a table by the window. He pushes back the blue-and-white checked curtains so they can look out on the street. He orders for them both: orange juice, toast, bacon and eggs, coffee. He spreads his napkin across his lap, looking around, smiling at everyone—the two plump, dark-haired waitresses, Nick in the kitchen, a table of burly Greeks.
Conrad sits in the chair, hands between his legs. He is exhausted, his eyes swollen and tight. He looks down at his hands, at his fingernails, bitten to the quick again. He doesn’t remember doing that. Narrowing his eyes, he blends everything to gray—the curtains, the walls painted with huge, atomic grapevines and leaves, the dark, gorilla-like man across the table from him.
“The little girl in Skokie is what started all this, am I right?” Berger asks quietly. “Crawford called me last night. He was pretty shook, too.”
“Oh God,” he says.
Berger hands him his handkerchief.
“Kiddo, you know the statistics. Out of every hundred, fifty are gonna try it again. Fifteen eventually make it.”
He had thought himself empty of tears, but without warning they start up again. He covers his face with his hands. “Don’t,” he says.
The waitress brings their breakfast, and he blows his nose, then props his elbows on the table. “She was okay,” he says. “She was fine. Into everything at school, and happy. She told me to—to be less intense, and relax and enjoy life. Shit, it isn’t fair!”
“You’re right. It isn’t fair,” Berger says. “I’m sorry. I’m damn sorry for her, the poor kid. Crazy world. Or maybe it’s just the crazy view we have of it, looking through a crack in the door, never being able to see the whole room, the whole picture, I don’t know.” He runs his hands through his hair. “Listen, eat,” he says. “You’ll feel better once you eat.”
But he is too exhausted to eat; he takes a few tentative bites of the eggs; pushes the plate from him. No go. Too risky.
“Come on,” Berger urges.
“I can’t,” he says. His legs feel as if they are weighted to the floor. “I don’t know what I would have done if I couldn’t have gotten you this morning. I felt so shaky.”
“And now?”
He closes his eyes. “Still shaky.”
Berger laughs. “That’s what I like about you, kiddo. You got style. Listen, what happened this morning was that you let yourself feel some pain. Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either. And the world is full of
He opens his eyes to study the ceiling, too tired to comment, even to think of a comment.
“Go home and get some sleep. You look whipped.”
“I can’t. My grandmother would hassle me all day. I can’t take the flak. She might even call my father and tell him I cut school.”
“So, go to your own house. You’ve got a key, haven’t you?”
He sits up. “Yeah, I do. I should have thought of that.”
Berger laughs again. “You would have. When are your parents due back?”
“Not until Wednesday.”
“Okay, go home, rest up, eat something, hear?”
“Should I come tomorrow? For my appointment?”
“Sure.”
“It’s okay for me to go, you think?”
“What d’you mean?”
“You don’t think I’ll do anything crazy?”
“Like what?” Berger asks. “Give yourself a haircut or something? You’re a big boy. You’re not gonna punish yourself for something you didn’t do.”
“All right.”
“And anyway, punishment doesn’t do a damn thing for the guilt, does it? It doesn’t make it go away. And it doesn’t earn you any forgiveness.”
“No,” he says wearily.
“So, what’s the point of it, then?”
Berger walks him to the car. As he gets in, tears well up again behind his eyelids. For so long he has shielded himself from hurt, not letting it be inflicted upon him. Suddenly he is naked, unprotected, and the air is full of flying glass. All his senses are raw, open to wounding.
He wipes his eyes. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Drive carefully.”
He lets himself in through the kitchen. The air inside is heavy with the sweetish odor of too-ripe fruit. Or furniture polish? He goes upstairs to his bedroom, laying his keys and his wallet on the dresser, opening the window, slightly.
He turns on the shower and strips down, leaving his clothes in a pile on the floor. He gets in; adjusts the water to as hot as he can stand it. He does his best thinking in here. The heat relaxes the clots inside his brain, making the juices flow, and he leans his forehead against the wall, hands behind his back, as the warmth spreads downward from his neck to his shoulders, his buttocks, the backs of his knees.
He closes his eyes, sees Berger, a confident, sly gorilla riding a unicycle in a red felt jacket, eating a banana. Berger smiles and waves. Gorillas don’t ride unicycles, though. The only one he has ever seen sat inside a huge truck tire suspended from a chain in his cage at the zoo. He rocked back and forth, sticking his tongue out at the world. Making judgments. He and Buck pondered the primitive intelligence of this gesture: People laugh but maybe he knows something, Buck said. We wouldn’t laugh if he gave us the finger, would we?
Guilt. Is not punishment, Berger said. Guilt is simply guilt. A run-in he and Buck had years ago, with a clerk in a drugstore. He said they had not paid for two comic books, wouldn’t believe them. He had threatened to call their father and expose them to the world as liars and thieves. Go ahead Buck said with scorn My dad knows we don’t lie and he knows we don’t take things. What do I care what you think? But he, Conrad, had cared desperately, and had felt, even as he knew he was innocent, guilty and shamed by it. Why?
Because it has always been easier to believe himself capable of evil than to accept evil in others. But that doesn’t make sense. The clerk in the drugstore wasn’t evil, just mistaken. Bad judgment doesn’t make you evil —can he only see these two opposites—good and evil? Innocence and guilt? Is it necessary to believe others guilty in order for himself to be proved innocent? There is a way through this, an opening, if only he can find it. He stands very still, letting water sluice over his shoulders and river into the creases of his stomach to his crotch.
“—C’mon!”
“—No. I changed my mind.”
“—C’mon, you promised!”
“—Why do I always have to go first?”
They are eight and nine the leader and the follower as always in the garage that day with the door closed stuffy and hot in here and Buck is abruptly disgusted with him.
“—Ah, forget it, big-ass baby! I said you could do it to me after!”
Buck turns away tossing the clothesline to the floor and as always with freedom in sight he opts for prison it is easier to face, than Buck’s cool contempt he stands obediently still as Buck ties his hands behind his back sits then as the rope is lashed around his ankles Buck pulls a handkerchief from his pocket “How can you make me talk if you gag me?” and Buck considers “First we torture you. Then we make you talk” but he is no longer sure turns his head just as Buck discovers you don’t need permission when you have the power forces him back against the cement floor sprawls across him while he ties the handkerchief around his mouth it is clean and smells faintly of his father abruptly for him the game is over terrified he struggles to free himself fights the gag choking a peculiar hollow clonging sound the garage door opening a shadow falls across them a cool breeze entering “What the hell is this?” he is pulled to his feet the ropes roughly loosened the gag snatched from his mouth not relief but horror as he sees Buck’s pantsjerked down to his knees his father’s hand cracking across the bare ass Buck howls in protest while he stands in helpless terror waiting for his punishment only a game but they had both been playing it and then his father’s anger is mysteriously spent and he kneels on the garage, floor, an arm around Buck’s shoulders Buck is sobbing his head down “Don’t you ever do a thing like that again, Bucky, you understand?”
“—But I wasn’t gonna hurt him, Daddy—”
“—People get hurt without anyone meaning it, don’t you see?”
For some inexplicable reason he was left out of this. Passed over. His shame and guilt ignored. It must have been too monstrous to mention. His crime, his part in it, and so he had to suffer alone. But what for? There is no evil there, after all. Just a boy’s game, dangerous maybe, but not evil, and not Buck’s fault, not his either. Nobody’s fault. It happened, that’s all. Not so frightening, is it? To believe them both innocent Oh God. His sinuses are packed with a spongy material. Tears leak out from beneath his eyelids. Resigned, he lets them come as he soaps himself carefully: his arms, his shoulders, and his back; his legs, between his legs. He stands and lets the water run over his head, washing his hair. When he is finished, he gets out, towels himself dry. Slowly and carefully he turns his arms up to look at the insides of his wrists.
In grade school a girl named Sally Willet sat next to him. She had taken his hand in hers one day, those strong, brown fingers tracing the creases in his palm, showing him his lifeline, curving beside the heel of his hand almost to his wrist: a deep and definite mark. He draws a ragged breath, wondering about Karen, about her lifeline. Was it a long one, too?
Tears of grief this time Not fair not fair! no, but life is not fair always, or sane, or good, or anything. It just is.
He hangs up the towels in the bathroom and turns off the light. He puts on clean underwear, picking up his dirty clothes, throwing them down the clothes chute. All the while the hot oily liquid seeps out from beneath his eyelids. He continues to blink it back, to wipe it away.
Reduction of feeling. At least he is not guilty of that today. He sets the alarm on his clock-radio, stripping back the covers on his bed. He climbs in and cleanliness surrounds him, its smell cool and seductive. He rolls to his face and, without a sound, without a thought, he sleeps.
28
The air is balmy and fresh as they sit on the patio, watching the boys swim. It is too cool this evening for the adults, and, besides, Cal is content to sip his martini, savoring the sharp, juniper smell of it as it mixes with the heavier perfume of the surrounding air. Magnolia. Around the pool the stiff, strawlike grass gives off a mossy odor.
Ward ra
“No,” Audrey says. “To that thirty-foot putt on the fifteenth hole. I was poking everybody around me. ‘Hey, that’s my brother-in-lawl’ ”
“You did look good, Cal,” Beth says.
He grins. “At isolated moments.”
“Well, you didn’t really expect to win,” Ward says.
“Hell, no!”
But that is the funny part, or maybe not so funny. After Saturday, when he saw that he could do it, that he had a good chance of doing it, he had tightened up. Those three double bogeys on easy holes. If he could have dropped a few more lucky putts like the one on the fifteenth. You didn’t expect to win. Maybe that’s it. You get what you expect.
“Why don’t we go out and celebrate anyway?” Ward asks. “How about it, you both like Mexican food? Or we could go to the Captain’s Table, whatever you want.”
“That’d be nice,” Audrey says. “Let’s go there.”
“I’ll check to see if we need reservations. What time? Nine? Ten?”