All This Life

Kathleen cringes at the use of the word fine. An impossibility. She draws the girl with the black eye’s stomach much larger than it actually is, a huge belly and a big baby visible through her skin, and she draws a black eye on the baby too because it’s a lesson every mother needs to learn. Disaster is inevitable. Disaster comes disguised in all kinds of gentle ubiquities, such as your son going to the park. Trying to ride a weather balloon. Trying to live.

This girl has to know what her child is in for, what they’re all in for: that their child won’t evade the world’s wrath because nobody does. Maybe it’s as simple as Tyler drinking too much and beating them up. Or there might be a car wreck, a lightning strike, any of a million iterations of violence too asinine to be true until they warp your world into pulp.

Kathleen runs her pen in circle after circle around the baby’s black eye. Defacing the baby. She makes the baby frown and tears run down its face and splotches from her red pen on the cheeks. The girl with the black eye and the baby with the black eye, and it’s time to draw Tyler.

“Have we landed in Paris?” the girl with the black eye asks.

Kathleen can’t stop this tentacle of anger slapping and convulsing around inside of her. It’s empowered by everything she left behind in Traurig. Feeling the high-octane angst of someone who has done something unforgiveable. It will burn forever, this fire. Never needing to be stoked.

“I’m doing my best,” Kathleen says, drawing Tyler’s face snarling and beads of sweat collecting and trickling from his forehead and his right hand knotted into a fist, scars across his knuckles, and his left hand has the girl with the black eye by the hair and there’s a conversation bubble coming from Tyler’s mouth that says, “Life beats babies!” and Kathleen hasn’t drawn the Eiffel Tower behind them because she doesn’t want to take them anywhere. Forget Paris. She wants them to remain here, with their baby’s bruised face and life’s unruly way of torturing everybody and the way that her husband turned on her after their son’s accident, the way they turned on each other. They always drank too much, sure, but now it was different. Screaming blackouts and hangovers and trying to adjust to their new damaged son and then the same the next day and the next. A recurring day. An outlandish hallucination. All this life, a punishment repeating until the end of time. Rolling that boulder up a hill but never reaching the top. Having your liver pecked out by an eagle every day. No parole or pardon or hope. Punishment until the world ends.

So she traded in that shared punishment for a new one. Not really an escape, because once she fled Traurig and got sober it was worse. Once her head cleared, she had her consciousness back. Her conscience. To relive her decision. To ponder every day what she did and why and maybe she had her reasons and maybe they were cogent reasons — at least understandable ones — but maybe they were not.

Three years living sober has taught her one malicious lesson: She made it worse once her head dried out. That’s when she was assigned her official boulder, her hill. That’s when the eagle got her address.

“I think I’m finished,” Kathleen says and turns the portrait around for them to see.

Their faces are astonished as they take in all the caricature’s details, the detritus of violence, the line of dialogue: “Life beats babies!”

No one says anything for about ten seconds, and finally Tyler stands up and says, “What’s wrong with you?” and Kathleen doesn’t say anything, and he says, “Lady, you can’t do that!” and then he knocks over the easel, and Kathleen keeps holding up the picture and the girl with the black eye sits there speechless and Tyler rips the portrait from Kathleen’s hand and crumples it and tosses it on the sidewalk and Kathleen falls down, too, landing next to her easel and caricature, while the girl with the black eye walks away, Tyler consoling her with each step they take.

Kathleen sits alone on the street, snatches the portrait, smoothes it out, looks at what she’s done.

The anger tentacle goes dormant inside her as she caresses the picture, feeling tenderness, an empathy she wishes she could’ve shown the girl with the black eye and Tyler and their baby, but it’s over now. All she has is this picture, this memory, and so she rubs it on her face, snuggling, smelling it, wishing it had the wonderful scent of her son’s scalp after he was born.

And she allows herself to do something forbidden. Something she doesn’t regularly indulge in, something off-limits and toxic and tough.

Kat imagines a portrait of her own hopeful family. One before Rodney set foot on that weather balloon. One before their mythological punishment. Kathleen, Larry, and Rodney all smile in this picture. They are together, and they have no idea what awaits them.

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