The Unknowns A Novel by Gabriel Roth

Author:Gabriel Roth
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780316223294
Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books
Published: 2013-07-02T07:00:00+00:00

After her mom dies it’s just the two of them. At school she forgets for most of the day that her mother is dead, just as she used to forget that her mother was alive, until at 3:45 she sees her father standing stone-still outside the school gates, surrounded by women. They go home together and he tries to make the foods her mother made, but he does it wrong. As a family they are incomplete, a stool with two legs. He can only make conversation by quizzing her. She learns to speak articulately on any topic.

Her classmates’ parents offer to help, and for the next few months Maya is taken to one of their houses most weeknights after school. Every family is different. Some watch TV during dinner and some don’t watch until after dinner and the Lehrmans don’t even have a TV. Later she will realize that her father was grieving, that while she was playing with Nina Barrick or Jenny Chen or Jenny Goldish he was lying on his bed curled into a ball or sitting on the couch watching TV with his hand in his pants. At the time she didn’t think of him as having internal states; she thought of him as being somehow missing, even when he was driving her home or serving her dinner.

She learns that when you say My mom is dead, kids say things like Did your dad kill her? Grown-ups, on the other hand, usually give you whatever you want. As a teenager she will realize that she has learned to deploy her mother’s death to her advantage. She has to train herself to stop.

Starting in the fourth grade, the texture of her memories is different, as though seen from a greater distance. She remembers her teachers, her best friend Christine Dunlap, a class trip to the La Brea Tar Pits, but not much that happened at home. She has a generic memory of her father sitting in the living room, reading a book and watching television at the same time. It’s important that he be sufficiently entertained. Did he read with the TV on every night? Just once? Never? She spends a lot of time in her room, where she inhabits a vaguely sketched fantasy world in which she has a dog who speaks to her telepathically and accompanies her on adventures. As an adult she sometimes remembers the dog as though it were a real pet. She knows that she didn’t just gradually outgrow the fantasy; it ended with some specific event. She can’t think of this without a pang of guilt, and she suspects that she must have killed the dog.

Every morning before work her father goes outside and swims one hundred laps. Every evening he prepares dinner, which is eaten at eight. Alcohol is involved. At dinner he introduces topics for discussion: What grounds are there for believing in God? Would it be ethical to genetically engineer children for high intelligence? She’ll improvise an answer, and he’ll probe her to determine whether her thinking is sufficiently rigorous.

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