If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This: Fiction by Robin Black

Author:Robin Black
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Life change events, Electronic books, Short Stories (single author), Fiction, Anthologies, Experience, Short Stories
ISBN: 9780679603689
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-03-30T01:14:54.575931+00:00

When Brooke returned just before dinner, she was as unruffled as her bedroom had been. All but her hair, which was a mess. She disappeared upstairs for a few minutes, returning with the whole auburn mass twisted into an elegant knot, for whose benefit Jean couldn’t imagine.

As they sat again around the table, neither she nor Brooke spoke very much, leaving Cliff, always happier speaking than trying to catch others’ words, to recount the many transformations he had witnessed that day.

The noises didn’t wake her; she was awake when she heard Brooke’s door open, then Brooke on the stairs, the front door, the distant hum of a car growing louder, the front door again, the stairs, the click of Brooke’s door.

Distinctly irritated, she rolled onto her side.

When the children were teenagers, she had dealt with their sexual activities, those known to her at the time, by pretending ignorance. Some of it was her disinclination to have that conversation with them, and some of it was her sense that they were of reasonable ages, that if she wasn’t going to object on principle, then she wasn’t going to send them out of the house—or have Cliff send them, which is how it would have gone. No thinking parent was in a rush for their child to park out in the darkness somewhere. People had been known to get shot that way. Once in a while, some sound would escape from behind a closed door, a gasp or moan, a bawdy laugh, but those were somehow sanitized and neutralized as they registered in Jean’s consciousness. Whatever sex her children were having was no more real sex to her than the stuff in their diapers had been real shit. Our children exist in some not quite human realm, she’d long before decided. They aren’t exactly people to us.

So it wasn’t parental squeamishness that made her turn the TV on now. And it wasn’t a disinclination to hear evidence, further evidence, of her daughter’s infidelity. Something else was producing this feeling, this pebble in her shoe, this grain of sand between her teeth. It was possibly, simply, the presence of sex in her home, when for several years she had tried to forget it existed at all. An absurd, impossible task, maybe. But what choice did she have? What choice but to pretend there was no such thing?

It hadn’t been until their second spring at the cottage that Jean had let herself understand, could no longer prevent herself from understanding, how thoroughly what felt to her like her first home felt to Clifford like his last. How each room, each wall, each patch of grass, tree, pebble, shaft of light was defined for them in these ways. How this sensation of not having to move twisted and shifted in Cliff into the sensation of not being able to move, so what gave her joy hollowed him. These pleasures of hers, she knew, were indebted to his age, to the strength of his frailty, to the cessation of his restlessness.

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