Disasters in the First World by Olivia Clare

Author:Olivia Clare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2017-06-05T18:04:35+00:00

Pittsburgh in Copenhagen

There was a great tenderness to the sadness when he would go there. She knew how much he loved his wife. They were like casualties helping each other as they waited for the end. She cooked their dinner at the stove, her blonde, bent head reflected, like an abstract sun, in a stainless steel pan on a hook.

On the table, delftware bowls of eggplant and sausage. Cricket on the English-language station on the radio. She didn’t like to talk at dinner—her English could be difficult. He brought out lemon and onion and folded the paper napkins the way she liked. She insisted on serving him. Or, if not casualties, they were thieves, taking these afternoons and evenings for themselves, their appetites, gathering up the few coins that had spilled in the act.

He got up from the table to get the child, her son, who’d woken and started to call. Beneath the mobile of rotating planets and stars at the foot of the crib, he found the child on its stomach, trying to hold up its head, its neck stretched like that of a straining tortoise—it could not make itself go where it wanted. In the crib was a small machine, simulating sounds of the ocean. You strange island, thought the man. Little life.

At the table, he held the child facing forward in his lap, so that it leaned toward its mother and the half-finished dinner into which she’d put so much effort. The man offered her a sip of beer, and she refused. There was something withheld about her now, eating very little very quickly. He supposed he liked to watch her eat; she almost revealed herself that way. One-handed, he tore a chunk from the top of his buttered bread and rolled it in a dense small ball between his fingers and offered this to the child—it was crying again, twisting its torso, coaxing itself into a fit.

“Give him to me,” she said.

“It’s all right.” The man tried to comfort the child, rubbing its heel between his fingers. A plain smoothness.

“I can take him.” She held out her arms.

“Just eat,” he said. “Relax.”

But she said she was finished and scraped flecks of salt and garlic off the table with the edge of her hand into her napkin. He felt his beard for crumbs and decided to tell a lie—that this had been his favorite meal. Maybe what she gave away to him was in her face, in the particular immobile expression that asked him to spend the night when she already knew he would. What she knew of his wife in America was all he’d told her—married fifteen years, almost.

The child had now screamed for what seemed like a minute, as if without taking a breath. The man turned it around in his lap. He held it by its fragile chest.

“Are you ready?” He pushed back his chair.

He threw the child up, nearly two feet above the tabletop, then caught the child. Very easy. It had stopped crying somewhere on the way down.

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