Men o’ War

We lost our boys to the same thing. Hers was nineteen, mine was twenty-three. We lost our boys to the same thing, and now each ripple in the world comes ashore like the knock of a long-awaited debt collector. The reaper of our malevolent fortune. My brother likes to tell me that the world’s been like this since before we were born, that what I really ought to try and do is stop paying attention to the news, but I can’t. Or as he likes to put it: I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. I try to keep my finger on the pulse of things, try to feel the ripples as they come into shore, but of course the shore changes so slowly. Entire months pass with the lassitude of a montage.

I suppose life’s like this: all you see is the same old thing, the same ol’ open water before the ship runs aground. I was a child of the ’60s. My mother was a Catholic and my stepfather an atheist. I never had much interest in God or war or interest rates. I remember being a serene and incurious thing, a consumer of nail polish and palm readers and Coca-Cola. I hung out in gas stations and laughed whenever Kurt snuck a pack of Beech-Nuts into his pocket. Talk shows bored me unless David Bowie was on. What I am trying to say is this: all ships look the same before one of them finally runs into the stacks. In the years since Damon left, all that’s really changed is I’ve come alive to the garbled ways of the universe. Like I said I was a sheltered, stupid thing, always ironic, always boy crazy. I photographed well, and I was bright enough to know that if I kept my face pert and my teeth white and my hair a certain way, I’d never be in want of company. In my dreams now I might have gone to school, might have studied architecture or interior design, but the way it all shook out I had Lydia by the age of seventeen and Damon a little while after that. I still hear from Lydia from time to time, but she’s married now and teaches yoga in a different city.

All I had was love, really. A chest that loved and loved until it could no longer circulate blood properly. I used to wonder all the time how long I would have to bear it, housing that heavy, distended tumor of a heart. Death never touched me, but adulthood always did. I cried every time I remembered I would have to grow up one day and leave my parents behind. I hated how my brothers seemed to take their love for granted. I loved them so much I would sometimes scream for hours at a time, let myself be caught stealing roses from the neighbor’s rose garden, just so I could relish their admonishment and learn to love them a little less. I knew what I was doing—I had been cursed by a lover’s heart. I wrote a story when I was a little girl about a boy named Alfie who had an awful secret: every night he would come home and take little nibbles of his mother’s flesh. He had a rare disease that made it so he would lose patches of skin from his face, until his face disappeared. That was how I saw parenthood as a child. As bodily sacrifice. And I loved my parents for it—maybe a little too much, I now see. Things got a little rough and tumble after Lydia was born. I had changed by then, but of course we all had, even the best little girls do not stay dumb forever. I took Lydia and ran and never looked back. Nobody thought I could raise that little thing myself, nobody did. Nobody understood how badly I needed to exorcise that swollen, beating heart.

I know what you must be thinking, once a lamb, always a...