The Ancestry of Objects by Tatiana Ryckman

Author:Tatiana Ryckman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2020-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

David never calls at midnight to say:

There are no numbers to call and no distant voices traveling detached from our bodies and nothing outside of us can say I miss you. or How are you? or I’m thinking of you./Are you touching yourself? And we do not say aloud to ourself that this will make it easier later, when it is over, so we will not be tied to the man by phone lines, we will not know the manicured lawn in front of his house, the proximity to favorite restaurants, the benign good taste of his life; it is good to keep him out of reach. And David does not say it will make it easier to keep from his wife when she returns, though it will, and he does not invite us into the clean luxury of his existence. Instead, David appears on the cement step on the seventh day of Lara’s trip, like a private Sabbath, holding a paper bag. I brought some things for dinner, he says walking in. Have you eaten already?

No, we say, confused by the comfort of pretending like children to be man and woman. When he begins to fill the dented pots with water and turns the gas on under them, we know to rub with our fingertips on the dry fabric of his shirt as he says it’s a good day: the twenty dollars in a pocket and work and now he’s here and he says that we make a good day. And our day, our existence as it crumbles around us is painted over in more pretending: that we should fill his glass; we should read the lines of his palm with humor and good fortune; we laugh when he says, I can be generous, as if: I can make you/this easy. We do not correct him that it is us who is giving so freely what he is looking for. That he will never be generous with what we need. We don’t want to be saved, just seen, to be real, okay, enough, but the water boils over, the white foam spill distracts him so that when he lifts the lid and steam fogs the clock and small window that looks out to the front door, we breathe deeply to forget as if it is the same as forgiveness, and when he replaces the lid he begins to pull new items from the paper bag: oil, spices—and we imagine these things lining the shelves in the clean hush of a remodeled kitchen, we imagine Lara by the stove, a good wife at the stove—and we say, I have all of these things. Laughing that he thinks we do not live in this house, or that we exist from nothing, but when we remember the wilted produce in the crisper drawer and the blank stare of the shelves every afternoon as we try to sustain or distract ourself, we wonder if he is right, if we do not know ourself at all.

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