This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories (12 page)

Eva did, it turned out, have a certain rare disease. It was some comfort to Fay, just to have it be
called
something. In what Carey (insulted) referred to as his “layman's terms,” the doctor described the manner in which their daughter had only
tricked
her body into feeling a pain that did not,
in fact, exist at all. Eva's mind, the doctor told them, had essentially sent out
alarm signals
to her body (pain, he had added, in brackets, for Carey and Fay) in preparation for a trauma that never actually arrived. Now both mind and body needed to be persuaded that the pain was super-fluous. That the trauma was a figment of her imagination. Almost a narrative device, which her mind had employed in lieu of any other adequate means.

All of this was at first perhaps even harder for Carey than for Fay to grasp. He was a methodical man with a quick mind, and was therefore used to understanding things right away. He was in fact so used to this that he no longer believed in anything that he didn't immediately comprehend. At first, therefore, he didn't believe in Eva's disease either. He had scoffed at the doctor and his “layman's terms,” which had succeeded only in convincing him that the doctor himself didn't have a clue what he was talking about. It seemed unthinkable to Carey that if his daughter was experiencing pain, it was not a legitimate effect stemming from a legitimate cause. “How could that possibly be a real disease?” he asked Fay. “Pain is pain,” he said. They had been assured, however, that although the disease was rare, it was not abnormal, whatever that was supposed to mean, and although Carey was, eventually, somewhat appeased by all the explanations (lay or otherwise) of the medical validity of his daughter's affliction, Fay became only more convinced by all of the reiteration that the
real cause
of her daughter's illness was neither physical
nor psychological, but stemmed instead from a sudden and extreme loss of faith, which she herself was directly responsible for.

Eva was hospitalized for the rest of that summer, and, until she forced herself to walk again, was refused everything that was substantial enough to be taken away. Parents' visits. TV. Books. Any somewhat edible food. These were returned slowly, as she began to progress. At first, they were disappointed in her advancement—her weight and her spirits continued steadily to diminish. Her legs, already thin, had begun to look useless and frail. Fay had panicked again—terrified that there had once more been some mistake, and that Eva's affliction was purely physical after all. She couldn't tell anymore what she wanted to be true. The doctor reassured her. It was certainly a “stubborn” case, he admitted, but there was no cause to worry. Eva would be walking again—he added encouragingly—very soon. And it was true.

That was at the beginning of September. By October Eva was back at school, easily making up the schoolwork she had missed, and seeming curiously optimistic.

FAY DID NOT RECOVER
quite so rapidly, and continued to blame herself for her daughter's ordeal—citing, to Carey, different and often conflicting logic in order to prove her own guilt. It must have been, she would tell him, in those early years, before she
knew any better
. “That's what everyone is saying now. Did you know that?” she'd ask. “That
the damage done to a child in those foremost years makes almost every effort afterward practically obsolete? It must have been then,” she'd say. Carey, however, even when pressed, could not remember this careless period at all, and truth be told, neither could Fay. When she first mentioned it to him, he had said only: “That's ridiculous. You've always been terrific with Evaline. I don't know what you're talking about.”

But men, Fay thought, were very often oblivious to these, and other, things.

Almost overnight, however, after the illness, Eva grew up. Not entirely (there were strangenesses, things that worried Fay still), but, for the most part, Eva became, in teenagehood, a
teenager
. No one could have been happier than Fay when Eva stormed through the house in a violent temper, or suddenly began talking on the phone at all hours to God-knows-who.
This
, Fay told herself, was normal. This was the manageable stuff. The old irregularities lingered, of course—but they manifested themselves in small ways, now. She had a terrific fear of insects, for example. She wouldn't scream or run, like Fay would sometimes, but would instead grow very pale and still until someone noticed and steered her from the room. Then there were the “fad” fears, which were as irritating as they were troubling. One week, for example, Eva would be so afraid of dying in a road accident that she would refuse to ride in the car—but then the next week, and with no seeming transition, the car would be forgotten, and it was elevators that she steered
away from. Then it would be the curb of the road, and several months would go by in which she left a wide berth between herself and the street, making crossing at intersections difficult. Still, though, as time passed and
teenage
hood more and more took its hold, these things diminished as well, until it seemed that Eva was an ordinary person with only very abstract fears of things.

She remained, of course, an intelligent child, with what her parents continued to refer to as an “overactive mind,” and so she was never unaware of the eccentricity of her behaviour. Sometimes Fay would wonder what she was paying the therapists for, when it was Eva who seemed to be able to articulate everything—the trajectory of her fears, their probable root causes, and incongruencies—so much better than any adult with whom these issues had so far been discussed. The insects, for example. Eva would puzzle over it out loud sometimes, like it was a riddle—or somebody else's problem. She calculated, for example, the likelihood of dying from an insect bite in North America, and it was something so ridiculously small that she admitted without qualm that the possibility was more or less absurd. “We must just fool ourselves into thinking we're rational,” she said once, after a similar exercise, “as a mechanism for survival. I mean,” she explained to Fay, “if we
think
we're rational, but clearly are not, we can justify anything.”

Fay and Carey had somewhat relaxed once Eva was safely in college. She seemed to adjust well and, to Fay's surprise,
even joined one of the sororities and involved herself in their affairs. Fay had always been against that sort of thing, and she was (she even admitted this to Carey) somewhat disappointed that her daughter would need to resort to such “institutional forms of acceptance.” Carey replied that—probably—institutional forms of acceptance were “just exactly what she did need,” and Fay tried to content herself with that.

FAY FEARED THAT
her departure—certainly a large-scale disruption from the regular order of things, which she had always attempted to maintain—might upset what she had always assumed to be, for Eva, a fragile balance, but, to the contrary, the departure seemed hardly to register at all. It was difficult to tell, though, because Eva refused to discuss the situation. On Fay's less optimistic days, of which there were many, she surmised that this refusal on Eva's part indicated that the damage was, indeed, running deep. This did not stop her from remarking, however (harshly, in a moment of frustration, which she later regretted), “Well, isn't irrationality a convenient
mechanism for survival
,” which was something that had stuck with her, like many things that Eva said over the years. Eva—immovable—had only calmly told her mother that, according to her theory (which Fay, she said, had abused), it was Fay herself who was acting irrationally, and
Fay
who needed, desperately now, to “justify” things. “You know,” Fay said, as calmly as she could, “you don't know as much as you think.” She
hadn't the least clue if this was true, but she had to say something.

It was frustrating, though—to have finally taken such an enormous step and have it go more or less unnoticed. All through that first fall Eva would continue to speak to her mother as though she had called up from the Redwood Plaza on the corner, instead of all the way from Paris, France. As though she had only stepped out for some “therapeutic overspending,” as she often had before, and that she would undoubtedly return, just as from those earlier excursions (the possibility that she would not being so disproportionately small …), milder, a little abashed, and with an apparent sense of fresh commitment toward their—touchingly—ordinary lives.

Even Carey, after the initial shock, and those first few weeks, within which the messages piled, pretty well stopped calling. He was waiting for her, he said, to “come to her senses.” This was just about what Fay had predicted. Carey, she'd told Martha after her first week in Paris, was, as the “ultimate human being”—a term she applied disparagingly—capable of adapting himself to anything, given enough time.

On the contrary, it took Fay three months to leave Carey after she had decided to do so, and then another three months to discover why she had. It wasn't, that is, until Eva was visiting over her Thanksgiving break in November that Fay at last connected the panic she had felt rising steadily within her, as she had stood in her garden cleats, stuck out
in the yard, to the one other, half-remembered occasion in which she had felt that way before.

As always, it was just some silly thing—something that Eva had said, a particular note in her voice as she said it—that served to remind Fay of that original occasion. But when she did recall it, she recalled it in such perfect and immediate detail that it seemed to be no more distant a recollection, suddenly, than the memory of only six months prior.

Fay and Martha had still been in high school at the time—though just barely. They would graduate in June, and it was already spring. It was a Saturday, and as usual, the five of them—Martha, Fay, Laurel, Marilyn, and—oh, but that was right. Linda had not been with them that time. It had happened on the weekend that Linda was away—visiting Mount Holyoke and William and Mary. A boyfriend of Marilyn's (whose name and identity escaped everyone's notice even then) had taken Linda's usual place in Bobby Zerembeh's car. So, of course—there was Bobby Zerembeh himself. The wonderful Bobby Zerembeh, who married Laurel within a year and a half, but was Martha's—as everything seemed to have been Martha's—then.

Axel's was the only place they knew of that would let them drink without any trouble. It was in the next town over, and they could only get there on Saturdays when Bobby borrowed his father's old beat-up Rambler. When he did, they would all pile in—the five girls and Bobby—and
drive the twenty minutes out on the back roads, because they preferred to take their time. It was, after all, those moments in the car before they arrived—when everything was about to, but nothing had happened yet, and the whole night spread ahead of them as if it belonged to someone else—that were the most precious. Once they arrived, and tumbled out, everything seemed to happen at once. They would be drunk almost right away just at the sight of the place—and then all over again on a pitcher of beer apiece, each for two dollars.

You could see New Jersey from Axel's, because of the way that the place was set out right there at the edge of nowhere. From that point—just outside of Axel's swinging door—there stretched only a large expanse of marshland. Then, on the other side of it, there were lights, and that was New Jersey.

Never once did they see another woman at Axel's, but the men didn't seem to mind it when the girls came. They were courteous and even gentlemanly—most of the time. The girls practised flirting, and bummed cigarettes. The men all slapped their thighs ironically by way of invitation, but they didn't kid themselves. Sometimes one of the girls, for a bit of a laugh, would sit down for just a fraction of a second on a proffered knee before she got up again, shrieking, to her feet—as though surprised to have encountered anything alive. The rest of them would be nearly doubled over in a corner, from laughing so hard. Bobby would be there too, of course, but with his eyes averted.

To Martha, and so to Fay, and to the rest, the men at Axel's were an
experience
—and experience they knew (of whatever kind) would stand them in good stead when someday confronted with the
real thing
. In return, the girls were gracious as could be; they didn't judge the men, or let them be judged, and even condescended sometimes to love them in an awful, sad sort of way. Even, or particularly, if there was something vaguely appalling about them. If they had no teeth, say, or gave one of the girls' bums a pinch as they were dancing. “Isn't it just—just so—
awful and sad
?” they would say to one another as Bobby drove them the long way home.

They were (even in those years, which later they thought of as their
cruel years
) capable of being tremendously
touched
by things. That was what Axel's was like. Like being
touched
to the quick by something outrageous, and bracing, and strange. When they felt that way, the whole place—that little rundown bar, right out at the edge of everything, from where you could see New Jersey—would suddenly feel warm and bright, and Fay would feel so full to the brim with something that she thought she might burst.

What it was she was filled with she didn't know then, and never would. She was only afterward able to recall the feeling through things that seemed to have so little to do with her, or with anything, that she wondered if she had really ever felt that way at all. It would come back, for instance, sometimes—just a hint of it—in the occasional
black and white images she saw (not a
scene
so much as a flicker—as though
between
images) on a blanched TV screen. Or else it would be the clattering sound of silverware—the sound of other people's meals being eaten, with great pleasure, from a distance. Why either of these things would bring anything to mind for Fay at all—let alone the
full-to-bursting
feeling that she had got sometimes on the Saturday evenings of her youth—was a great mystery. Especially the silverware. No one ever ate anything but peanuts at Axel's place.