Reply All: Stories by Robin Hemley

Author:Robin Hemley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press

The List

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TO OUR FRIENDS,

Sam and I had an eventful year, and while we would like to correspond with each and every one of you to wish you a joyous holiday, time won't allow it, so we hope you won't mind this form.

Corrine, our youngest, sparkled in her dance school's performance of Swan Lake. Though she stubbed her toe on one of the stage lights, and broke it (the toe, not the light), she struggled on like the little trouper she is without telling anyone—even after the show was over, she refused to tell anyone. Sam thinks I push her too hard and that she is afraid to admit her failures to me, but I think that, in fact, she has inherited some of Sam's Midwestern stoicism, and thinks that to admit pain is sinful. I personally couldn't care less about my children's failures. All I ask is that they do their best, and then I stand back and beam. For whatever reason, Corrine didn't tell either of us about her broken toe until weeks later when the toe became infected and then gangrenous. By that time, it was too late and the foot had to be amputated.

Corrine has adapted well, as have I, but Sam—out of grief, I suppose, or simply as an excuse—started having an affair with one of his students. He thought that I didn't suspect, but actually, I couldn't have cared less. I think only the siege of Leningrad lasted longer than the amount of time it's been since we made love. I'm not trying to gain your sympathy here because, in truth, I'm as much to blame for the dissipation of our marriage as Sam—his stoicism, my denial, we're a tag team of dysfunction. But we've made it twenty years together, and we send out almost two hundred Christmas cards a year, the picture on the front of our loving family in front of the Christmas tree virtually the same but for Sam's hairline and my more and more insistent smile, the children a few inches taller, the tinsel shiny as always. I'm not trying to depress you. Really. There's nothing I'd like more to tell you than that we're completely fulfilled, as I'm sure you'd like to tell us. To admit anything less is to admit defeat, even a kind of moral failure. Happiness has become, not an inalienable right to be sought, but a duty, and if we fail, we risk censure, we risk being taken off the list. When Gretchen Sanders went into rehab, she was taken off the list. When Harrison Elders was indicted, when Jeanine Watanabe…

The fact is, I don't really care about any of you, or at least I care as little about you as you care for me. This shouldn't shock any of you, not really. If you really cared about me and Sam, wouldn't you do more than reserve one stamp a year to send me a list of all your petty triumphs and comic mishaps? Is that

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