Dex’s mother, despite claims by her husband and daughter to the contrary, did in fact have a healthy sense of humor. She had for many years, for example, found her life hilarious. That everything she had been and wanted had been whittled away, her edges smoothed into a featureless surface without a name of its own. Hannah Dexter’s mother. Jimmy Dexter’s wife. You when something was needed; she when something was not. She felt, at times, that what had seemed like an infinity of choice turned out to be a funnel, life narrowing itself one bad decision at a time, each mistake cutting the options by half, spiraling her ever downward until there was nowhere left to fall but into a small, dark hole that had no bottom.
Choosing a life for yourself, that was the joke. She had chosen Jimmy Dexter, yes, but only after the state had chosen to yank her scholarship because the governor had chosen to cut educational funding; she had chosen the charming guitar player with the lopsided smile, yes, the one who kept her up all night declaiming Vonnegut and debating Vietnam and allowing her, through a haze of smoke and pseudointellectual acid rants on the doors of perception, to pretend she was still in college—but she had chosen that Jimmy, not the one who couldn’t understand why he wasn’t to play his guitar while the baby slept or why the changing table wasn’t an appropriate surface for rolling joints. They’d fallen in love because they both desperately wanted the same thing: Better lives. Bigger lives. It never occurred to her that it should matter how they expected to get there. She believed in work; he believed in hope. Here was the biggest joke: It turned out this wasn’t wanting the same thing at all.
They’d hollowed each other out, she and Jimmy, and now they were good for no one but each other. Most days, she thought that was no worse than anyone else had it, that the world was full of empty husks, smiling and following through. Some days, though, the bad ones and the best ones, she thought about running.
Her daughter would leave for college soon. When the time came, Dex’s mother thought, she would leave, too. She was almost worried that he’d leave her first, except that if Jimmy still had it in him to leave, she might have found it in herself to love him again, and to stay. She wanted her daughter gone so they could get on with it; she wanted her daughter to stay, wanted to hold on and scream stop growing stop changing stop leaving—then Lacey came along and soon there would be nothing left to hold onto, because piece by piece, Lacey was taking her daughter away.
Dex’s mother knew what it was to lose herself in someone brighter, to be trapped by the gravitational field of another sun. She knew what happened when it emerged that the sun was only a lightbulb, and what happened when the lightbulb burned out. It didn’t seem fair that her mistakes hadn’t been genetically encoded in her daughter, that there’d been no evolutionary adaptation, no innate biological resistance to light and charm. It made her shamefully jealous, watching her daughter fall in love, and what else could you call it—jealous and wistful and mindful of younger days, and maybe it even made her a little nostalgic for the strum of Jimmy’s guitar and the way his eyes had always found her in a sparse crowd, fixing her with every sorry lyric he sang. But more than anything, it made her feel like the mother of a daughter, like she’d taken Communion and joined a fellowship of women across distance and time, because finally, as had long been promised, Dex’s mother was afraid.
US
April–July 1992
DEX
The Devil’s Playground
THE FIRST TIME LACEY GOT me high, nothing much happened. Lacey said the mushrooms were too old, and anyway her mailman’s cousin’s friend wasn’t exactly the most reliable supplier, so who knew what we were getting. I had angled for pot instead; pot was everywhere, and as far as I knew it couldn’t turn your brain into scrambled eggs, no matter what the commercials said. But Lacey said pot was for plebes.
The second time Lacey got me high, we went to church.
Nothing local, obviously. We drove to Dickinson, three towns over, and pulled over to the first cross-topped building we could find. We waved at a couple old ladies hobbling across the parking lot, and because they weren’t Battle Creek old ladies, they didn’t know any better than to wave back. What nice girls, I bet they thought.
We nibbled on the mushrooms. Lacey licked me on the cheek, which she did sometimes when she was in a good mood, quick and darting, like a cat. “What you are to do without me, I cannot imagine,” she purred. We’d just read Pygmalion in English, and the line delighted her. I liked another one—I can’t turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the voice and the face. They are not you.—but it was harder to slip into conversation.
“When do you think it’ll start?” I asked her. The last time, we’d chopped up the mushrooms and mixed them in chocolate pudding, to make them go down. This time we were purists. It was like eating a Styrofoam cup.
“Maybe it already did.” She laughed. “Maybe I’m not even here, and you’re just imagining me.”
I gave her the finger, and we went inside.