Each One a Nation, page 25
“Well what’s the point then? What’s the point in striving if you’re not going to do it all the way? To try to be the best? What’s the point of living spread so thin that you never take up any space at all?”
This takes a lot out of Devyn, feeling it more and more each day as a Sisyphean task rather than a rational one, and growing more and more tired of defending it as absolute law. Devyn was not prepared for Seth to answer her insult and feels herself tumbling backward in her stance against him.
Seth knows that the conversation is over, and that Devyn has taken to arms. He turns his eyes back to the families in the water while Devyn shifts hers back to him. The only thing in the world he wants for Devyn is contentment, which is the mark of a true friend—to find it within oneself to love a person not more than they can love themselves, but to do so sufficiently in the places for which they cannot love themselves. He knows she is wise enough to see it his way with time, but time is a thing struggled through when hope is all one has to offer another person.
“I am happy, Dev,” he says, “and I hope that one day you can say the same.”
“Well I’m happy, too,” she says, “but I guess I’m just too showy about it to be believed.”
“You aren’t showy, Dev,” he says, “but you don’t care, or at least don’t show that you care about anything but what you’re doing. You focus yourself so diligently onto what your goals are that you don’t even realize when other people are setting aside their own to keep you upright.”
“Keep me upright?”
Devyn begins to laugh as if to tell her friend that he’s not only ridiculous, but wrong. She’s grown weary of anything resembling criticism, believing that by now she should have earned something like an invincibility to it, and that her resume ought to disqualify her from needing it from anyone but herself.
“I keep myself upright, Seth, and that’s my point. Just because you don’t do that for yourself doesn’t mean nobody else can.”
Something, though he doesn’t know what, tells Seth that he ought not give in to the knee-jerk urges he feels to react to Devyn’s assaults on his character, but instead chooses to view them as the very final death spasms of an ego, a version of his friend that is surely dying though it fight mightily for another tomorrow. He, having spent his young life paying attention to his friends, knows the end is near for Devyn’s current self, and that her best chance at surviving the complications of her coming broken heart begins with their own understanding of its breaking, and that though he may love her, he cannot force her to see.
He takes his best action, which in the heat of the moment is only to walk away. He leaves her alone to ponder herself from the tower, walking along the border of the pool without saying another word, only stopping to smile at people in the water and to pull up the temperature gauge for an unnecessary examination of its reading. He continues silently to the other side of the pool where the adjacent lifeguard stand sits, and there he climbs it, sits, and begins again to scan the pool behind his dark glasses. From the other side of the pool he can see Devyn throwing internal fits and trying her hardest not to look at him.
Six
Aflu strikes Peyton in July, hardening his cardiovascular system, blanketing him in fatigue, and causing a crisis of faith as he wonders how God, who for so long seemed to be on his side, could hamstring him so suddenly as his finest hour drew near. He’d come home from practice on a Tuesday morning after sweating through his hoodie and throwing up twice in the boys’ locker room. When Mary finally got him into his room and put a damp towel over his head, he began to see stars and told his mother that he believed something to be very wrong. Mary, having raised four other children, only places an understanding hand on his cheek before leaving Peyton with his cold rag, a cold drink with a straw, and his lonesome thoughts, which begin to tumble into a world where he is not invincible and his future is not written.
Sloane arrives less than an hour later with fresh baked goods, medicines, electrolyte beverages, and a get-well card that she’d painstakingly chosen after no less than twenty minutes in a drug store gift aisle. She arrives to find a dramatic scene. Peyton, having far outgrown his bunk bed, dwarfs the medal borders even with his head propped and toweled. He is sweating still, and moans about his ribs as he coughs into tissues. Sloane is not concerned for him, knowing that he will indeed be okay, but instead she feels a strange sort of pleasure in seeing him small, humble, and weak. She takes great pleasure in nursing him back to health and feels like she is gaining favor with him as well, and as she sits silently watching TV with him, she feels herself move into him, into his spirit and mind just a little bit more as something undetachable and undeniable. Inside of Peyton is something similar. He feels a burden shift in his atmosphere, and a newfound responsibility begin to pin his feet to the ground. She looks so beautiful to him sitting there with him, her eyes on the tv, a slight smile at its contents with her hand on his forearm. Her hair is blonde and curly and her lips are slight; she presses them together with much effort in the times when she is saying nothing. He feels overcome by who she is, by the strength in her loyalty and the courage in her ability to love him despite all he has done. He feels like he must fall to her feet and kiss them, to consume her with what he feels and what he has to offer her and to make it understood that she is the only one who gets to receive any of it. All of this is intensified by his fever and by the aches in his body. If his body is to fail him, he thinks, then his heart must go on and it must go on only for her.
“I go corny over you,” he says to her in a low, painstaking purr. “You make me wanna goodboy. I wanna be goodboy with you.”
Sloanes smiles at him, assuming that he is either sedated by cough syrup or overcome with fatigue, does not fully comprehend the spirit moving within him. He is reaching heights that he did not previously believe in and as men mostly do, he is trying to memorize every piece of it before it goes away.
“Okay, honey,” she tells him as he falls into a deep sleep.
Seven
Acoworker drops Marli off at the Jackson home and she finds Eddie sitting on the stairs smoking a cigarette. Before she even reaches him, he knows, somehow, what she is going to say. And as she sits down next to him with a sideways smile, he takes her hand to help her soften the blow on him.
“I really do think I’m pregnant,” she says, “with your child. How do you feel about that?”
Regardless of his intuition, the words themselves land like downward falling hornet stingers come from high above. As he absorbs them, he feels an unseen coating on his skin shed off immediately and for a moment he feels cold, exposed.
“I just want to say beforehand that I am happy,” says Marli. “I’m happy it’s with you if it’s gotta happen. I’m happy it’s not with somebody I could ever grow to hate.”
He only sits there for a moment longer before the hope in Marli’s cheeks deadens and sulks and the faith in her shoulders fails causing her to slouch into him with a barely audible sigh.
“I wouldn’t have told you just now if it’s a bad time for you, I just figured you might want to know now so that we can make a plan and stuff,” she continues.
He tells her that he is indeed happy by taking her to him and resting his chin on the top of her head and rubbing her back while he thinks about why he is happy. He is happy, not only to be a father, but to be bound to her forever by something that could not be put away, could not be disclaimed as fact. From the day of the child’s birth until either its or their deaths there would be a thing that existed that is equal parts of them, and even if it were to perish, it will have been, being more than there was prior to its being.
And so began the long and perilous project of navigating pregnancy under the weight of poverty. As they are kicked from clinic to clinic, gathering what little they can from varying doctors, all of whom would much rather be practicing elsewhere, and as they scrounge and struggle every last cent that they can out of their waking hours, they, from time to time, look up and realize they aren’t alone, that both EJ and Boone have walked quietly along with them, scrounging and saving as well, donating themselves wholly to the cause.
It’s on the couch, just after dinner at the Jackson trailer in the final days of July that the burden becomes too heavy for Marli, as EJ brings her freshly brewed tea in the comfort of the living room that he has kept absolutely spotless since learning of her pregnancy and as Boone and Eddie work diligently at the dishes, she breaks into a sob and says, “I can’t handle it!”
Physically, she shows just slightly. EJ runs through the things he has read about pregnancy and realizes that all of it amounts to very little. Certain that she means she is in physical pain he replies, “Yes, you can! You’ve done so great already, and you can continue to!”
“No,” she says, clinging tightly to a pillow, “it isn’t the baby that I can’t handle, it’s all that you three have given me when I can give nothing in return.”
Eddie and Boone hear her from the kitchen and drop what they are doing to go to her. Eddie sits next to her and takes her by the hand while Boone gathers a blanket for her and EJ stands dumbfounded, still holding the tea.
“It’s that I can do so little and all I get is overwhelming love, and I don’t feel deserving of it! I don’t feel as though I should be so helpless and yet so rewarded.”
“But you’re doing the real work,” says Eddie, “the least we can do is what we can for you.”
“That’s for sure,” says Boone, “besides, what else do any of us have? You and this baby give us something to live for.”
Though generally not one for open sentimentality, EJ is touched by the situation and feels guided to add to it.
“Marli, dear,” he says, “look at this place. Look at the three of us. We are each of us fallen men, and look at what your heroism has made of us. Take a moment to look around you and think about what this scene looked like before you and what it looks like now.”
Marli swipes a clot of cold mucus from her nose and actually does look around. She notices the boys for the first time and how much cleaner they look. She notices the room and how it no longer smells like degeneration. She continues to notice things that she hadn’t noticed until she not only feels better but feels whole for the very first time in her life.
Eight
August breaks as Seth drives away for Statesboro with a carful of his belongings and his mother while his father attends to an Astra fire in St. Louis. He is the first of his friends to leave for college, and as he passes through downtown for one final time as a full-time resident, he is faced with the nostalgia one feels upon leaving something dear. His final weeks were spent, though he doesn’t know why, preoccupied by the pursuit of Devyn, of seeing her and speaking to her and touching her as much as he can before that final alarm clock’s ringing on that final day. Devyn, in return, has cleared her schedule outside of training so as to see him and tend to his worries, and the two have found themselves sneaking off to be alone, not knowing quite why or for how long they will feel the need to do so. He is faced now with his life’s first major decision in becoming who he is. He can either choose to leave everything behind and bootstrap an entirely new faction of himself, or he can hold on. He spars silently behind the wheel while his mother deals with her own fiasco in the passenger seat, and the two of them stay that way, broken only by stops for fuel and for food, until they reach GSU and its move-in-day banners and directional signs and smiling student ambassadors.
He and Martha both remain silent as football players in neon shirts help them with his things and as resident advisors go over protocol and dole out keys. The whole awful thing is over in no time and he drives her to a small municipal airport where an Astra jet idles on the runway and it’s time to say goodbye, and as Martha finally breaks and sobs into her son’s shoulder, he too lets himself feel it and realizes exactly what it really means. Once he understands, he realizes exactly how difficult the coming months will be. He wants to tell his mother right then and there that he is madly in love with his childhood friend and that it’s all that matters to him now, and that no amount of collegiate amusement or foreign flesh is going to matter until he tells her how he feels. But all he does is pull his mother close until her own tears subside. She steps away from him and tells her that she is so proud of him, and then she too is gone and Seth McWhite is left alone in his car on the first day of his new adult life.
He drives back to campus in absolute silence, thinking about his life and about his friends but mostly about Devyn. He wants more than anything to reestablish his presence in her life, to take the thing that he is in her life and to replace it with something very new. But then he thinks about her life, and what it is becoming, and realizes that to do what he wants to do would be a nuisance rather than a pleasure. And so he walks to his new room without taking any action and decides to at least try to dissolve into this life instead.
…
She feels his absence for the first time when she arrives at the GAC and he isn’t there. Her friend’s leaving has left her feeling wholly unaligned, and she slogs through the few remaining sessions before her flight to Austin for the biggest event of her life. She’s been dealing with a nagging illness, a blue emotion stemming from Seth’s leaving, and a tightness in her left hamstring. Bobby, knowing the mental mishaps that show themselves in athletes during the weeks leading up to a large event, has monitored Devyn cautiously while also maintaining the personal theory that all of her maladies are, at an unconscious level, attempts to self-sabotage. For this reason, he’s remained tough in his dealings with her complaints, and has continued to push her to train through her discomfort. To deal with this, she has resorted to abandonment of abandoning him to return to the place where she goes instead though her body still motions through his wishes.
She finds herself going there more often to deal with the shock and embarrassment caused by her father’s affliction and the growing tension of her own success. She goes there to avoid her mother’s hysteria and the dull, panging attention of her teachers, who, having learned one thing about her, greet her each day with questions about her that have nothing to do with who she actually is. She goes to the place to not feel bad about the hate she feels for them, to not have to face the fact that she wants so badly for the people who are nicest to her to disappear. She goes there with Bobby because Bobby not only doesn’t mind, but encourages her to do whatever it takes to win for both of their sakes.
When her session is over, she slinks to the locker room, undresses and dresses, all the while ignoring her teammates and exits without saying a word. She drives home in silence and retires to her room where she begins packing for New York, seeing it as the only thing she has to look forward to. It’s a dark moment, a heavy moment, and as she sits on her bed she almost lets it overcome her. But then she picks up the phone and calls Seth. He answers instantly.
“Hey,” she says. “You busy?”
“I’m so busy,” he says.
“Are you really?”
“I’m never too busy for you.”
She smiles to herself and says,
“Can you stay on for awhile? This week is stressing me out and I think I miss you already.”
“You think?” he asks.
“Can you stay on?”
“Yeah,” he says, leaning back in a uniformed chair at his dorm desk, “I can stay with you.”
Nine
Sometime late in the evening, each evening, the two cross each other in a low-lit living room and regard each other with grunting acceptances.
“Goodnight,” says Eric.
“Goodnight,” replies Darlene, and they both return to their own spaces mentally. He spreads himself wide open in the corner pocket of the sectional, with his phone resting on his thigh, his dominant hand on top of it, while his other hand uses the remote to flip through channels, each of which he ponders silently for a spell before moving on. She slides lazily into the bedroom on the other side of the parlor where she hits the bed with a thud and lays there face down, completely miserable and occupied mentally.
Darlene has now forgotten the truth about what their marriage was before, back when they still loved each other to the point of wanting to touch each other, understand each other, knowing whether or not things with each other are truly okay. This is no longer the protocol. It is only a matter of upcoming tasks and completing them for both sides of the marriage. Darlene completes tasks like Eric does, but unlike Eric, still looks up to see if anyone’s noticed her doing so. It’s this sensitivity, she knows, and its accompanying requirements that have led her so far astray from the love and marriage she used to know. She wonders often about how Eric could have been so completely aware that this is what she needed from the very beginning and how he could have forgotten so completely with the luxury of time. He no longer subscribes to her requirements and she knows it, and it’s for this reason and this reason alone that it is even possible for Neal Streeter to occupy even the tiniest increment of her thinking. The more he gives her, she finds, and the less Eric gives her, the more space Neal occupies. This is Eric’s fatal miscue, that somewhere along the line he believed that attention and acknowledgment toward Darlene lost its power as a currency, and that in its place real currency and the things it can buy began to suffice. For Darlene though, nothing suffices for attention, nothing smells more like love.
She feels foolish for having been strung along year after year by goals and ambitions that laid nestled deep into the future and has spent far too long oblivious to the fact that her present is and almost always has been very unhappy. Having now known a kind man’s attention again, she feels fooled by Eric and she resents him for having identified this yearning in her early on and having played it every day since.
