Night Swim by Jessica Keener

Author:Jessica Keener [Keener, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936558278
Publisher: The Fiction Studio

3

Chapter Thirteen

Amorphous

My youngest brother came into this world bearing the unseeable of unseeables: faith. He came into the world with knowing. From birth Elliot rode the emotional currents that stirred up our household. He did this instinctively and innocently, as if each swell in the familial sea were a natural occurrence. He didn’t know any other way. I guess none of us did. But he was more accepting.

His entrance into life deepened Mother’s reticence. If I was used to her retreats, whether in the garden, or on the phone, or at the club, after Elliot her absence became customary. We were entities whose biological threads connected to something amorphous, which we called Mother. So, instead, Elliot tied himself to his dreams and imaginary friends.

Love was something distant that retired to a room on the second floor.

Mother was beautifully ethereal and because of that Elliot sought that which he could hold in his hands — tactile things, touch. So it was that he first came to love miniature toy animals. He embraced them. He entrusted them with his emotional survival. To these things he grew attached.

He coveted any kind of replica. He collected small china elephants, dogs, tigers, sea lions that came inside cereal packages. He ferreted them out of tea boxes. In this imagined world he tended to injuries and set his second family on his windowsill for repair. He understood explicitly that living beings needed sun and air, wind and rain. They needed tending to. They needed love.

The amazing thing about his animals — and the numbers grew so that Dora complained and said it was impossible to dust his room — was their ability to listen. A mere glance on his part and all his animals knew his feelings. A slight tilt in his arm, an unsuspecting nod and they figured things out. Elliot told me his animals could do this. They knew him best. But as I saw it, they expressed his ability to intuit and emote.

He felt things. At the same time he did not feel compelled to verbalize what he felt or saw the way Robert did. With Robert, words were not necessarily transports of emotion but detached observations, descriptions of actions and things. Definitions kept Robert in control. “The reason why they have shiva is because shiva means seven in Hebrew and that’s why shiva lasts for seven days.”

He didn’t take the meaning beyond that.

In our house that roiled with shouts and protests, Elliot understood the value of remaining quiet, unperturbed and imperturbable. In our house, voices tangled like sewing thread at the back of the drawer. To avoid the squabbles that formed into tiny, ever-tightening knots, he retreated too, but unlike Mother who moved through the house edgily nudging and pushing to her destination of remoteness, Elliot exuded softness. He was putty in the family’s hands. He slackened the rope and in so doing, released tension around him. In this way Elliot eluded Father’s incisive glare, and appeared nonplussed by Robert’s inexhaustible outrage: “I don’t like all those people looking at me.

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