Read Online Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth - Free Book Online Page A

almost nothing. She paused as if listening. Had she heard Myers? She looked like a struck match, light hair blowing, body trembling. She did not turn. No one saw anyone who wasn’t supposed to. Myers held up a finger and blotted her out.
    Then they all went on.
    Gray himself, when Myers managed a glance, always had the same startled look on his face, as if he’d just received an insult. And he seemed not to know how to stop once set in motion, apart from the pauses and the demented jerks.
    If you think about it, everyone is behind someone and in front of someone. The nature of the sphere, right? No one gets left at the end or is forced to take the lead, and in this way you might say the shape of the earth is democratic. There are hesitations, of course. There are lines going in ways that you wouldn’t imagine. People are passed up or passed over. The tempo is irregular and messy. If you thought about the entirety of it, the legs, the back and forth, it’s a fiasco, an anarchy of steps. It’s impossible. And there’s no way to tidy it or make it in any way manageable, not in one’s imagination or anywhere else.
    After all, it was exhausting enough—the job, the wife, the commute, the wandering after her until all hours of the night. Just getting food into one’s body was a chore. It was absurd, how could anyone do what they did and have to come home and talk about anything other than lights or locks? But was he going to confront her before he knew what she was up to so she could come up with some outrageous lie and then he’d never find out the truth? It all seemed like a nightmare in any case, and he wasn’t entirely certain he wouldn’t wake up soon.
    It wasn’t about the arguing, of course, but one of them seemed to decide to pretend it was about the arguing and the other without saying so agreed and then there was no going back, it fixed between them: None of this would be happening if we didn’t argue so much. This is how it started to add up, bit by bit.
    They fought. The tea. One of them didn’t want it but the other had made it anyway and the result was two cups when there should have been only one. The one who didn’t want it had said so, but too softly, and the other hadn’t heard.
    The one who didn’t want it always speaks too softly.
    The one who made it never hears.
    The one who didn’t want it never knows what to want and what not to.
    The one who made it always wants too much.
    And this was like other things in their love. It was like sex in their love. Or lack of. (Ahem?) Or at least less of. It was like cooperation in their love. It was like friendship in their love. And/or it revealed their love, an aspect of it they had not previously identified, had not yet protested.
    It was a terrible thing what had happened with the tea.
    It was an act committed in duty but resulting in alienation. No, it was a passive act resulting in aggression. No, it was a demonstration, a lesson, a portent.
    She hadn’t gone hobbling off after complete strangers when they met, of course, but it had to have been somewhat inside her all along. A thing like that doesn’t grow out of nothing, without divine intervention, without a seed in the soil, without a small star, so small no one could see it, that one day explodes.
    No, it was there but no one could see it and somehow it had grown. He himself must have watered it or blown it up with air or thrown more wood on it or tacked more pieces to it because how could this wife have come from that one without her husband’s help?
    No, he had no intention at all of revealing what he knew.
    Where have you been? was the most he’d give away.
    I didn’t know I had a curfew, she said.
    I called you at work.
    I didn’t know I was in lockdown.
    They said you’d left.
    Nobody told me about the martial law.
    He left off following her to follow other women. He could be unfaithful in the same way she was, easily. The women went down sidewalks, through subways, out into crisp