Family Physics

You’ve been going through a lot, Sarah said on the phone. Everyone kept saying this to me, that I had been going through a lot. I did not agree, yet I knew the “lot” to which she was making an inaccurate reference was how, in the last three months, I’d gotten married, filed for divorce, moved several times, quit my job, and driven to Montana, where I began working in a grocery store, stocking beans. Karen had called it The Blitz, though it’s not like anyone died. But Karen is, by most accounts, my mother, so she has a certain perverted perspective on what I do, this thing that was once in her body, now walking around the world, messing things up.

How are you doing? Sarah asked. Are you feeling all right?

I feel all right.

Do you?

Sure.

Okay . . . But do you really?

Tell me about you. How’s law school?

It’s med school and I’m fine. I’m just concerned about you. Dad said I should call.

Ethan had called me daily for the past week, and before him it had been Linda, and before her, Karen, as if they’d organized shifts. It was hard not to feel as if I were a maybe-expired food that they were each smelling. I had always been the fermented vegetable of the family, but now it seemed to them (or it seemed to me that it seemed to them) that this rot had gotten the best of me. This time Sarah was calling to say she was going to come check in on me, for real, physically, despite my telling her I was fine, there was no need for a visit. She arrived the next day.

It’s just a lot, she said on the drive from the airport. It’s a lot to go through.

You all keep saying that, I said, missing a stoplight, horns blaring and tires squealing around us, but what do you even mean?

Holy fucking fuck, Sarah shouted, even though we’d made it through just fine. No one got hurt. She’d always been nervous in cars.

We’re fine. Then, after a long silence I suppose she meant as punishment, I said, again, everyone’s fine.

I’d always tried to keep my distance from my parents and sisters, but they outnumbered me, were always closing in, always calling, always telling me that family is important, always talking among themselves about what to do about me, and though I thought of cutting them out entirely, I had already learned the hard way, years ago, that such an extreme approach was more trouble than it was worth, like shaving your head—like any short haircut—some kinds of obliteration required constant upkeep—so I let my relationship with them get overgrown and ragged.

Mom’s so worried she can’t even sleep. Sarah stared into my peripheral as I drove.

When are you going to get a place of your own?

She kept staring. I moved out seven years ago.

Seven?

Um, yeah.

How old are you again?

Guess. She thumbed her phone as she waited.

This wasn’t going to go well. I’d never been good at remembering things that meant little to nothing to me, especially years, periods of time, exact dates. I was older—I could remember that much—but I wasn’t sure how much older and at the moment even my own age—thirtysomething . . . three or eight or six—wasn’t entirely clear. Was Sarah old enough to a have a habitual, though pointless, relationship with the newspaper’s real estate section? How old is a person when they finish college? Had she skipped a year?

She interrupted my calculating with an eruption—I’m twenty-fucking-five! You’re thirty-five, Bridget, and I’m twenty-five. Ten years between us, and guess what? It’s always been that way! I don’t understand why you never can remember.

She had wanted to insult me, too, to call me a freak or a cold bitch or something, but...