ORDER Enough by Eric Anderson
Excerpt

Lucille  

    I was named after a television character. Being named after a particular person endows you with a certain expectation. You are at once a tribute to the person and an embodiment of their image. I wonder if there is some cosmic transference of the image the mother and father conceive that infuses itself within the genetic makeup of the child. Or is the image imprinted slowly over the years while the child grows? Who knows? I am what I am. I mull over the past. How can I not? This is all about me. This is the person I believe myself to be. If I am considered sentimental, then I’m being scrutinized from a place that isn’t a part of my world. This is my life as I remember it, despite what might be called the facts of the past. My facts will become the facts. My ability to own my own past makes me certain of one thing: I am clever. The story of my life plays itself out in my mind and I am the one who decides what’s what. With this dedicated concentration, the world becomes my own. I am writing the story of my life and the lives of those around me in the form of a novel so it will become unquestionably concrete. It seems that the tale of my life has been building up inside me for many years and now I am at a point where it must be cast out.  
    But what’s the use of an autobiography? I am writing of my past in the way that I remember it. It can only be a work of fiction. I have lived my life as if it were fiction. I am filled with it. It was acquired over years of living in a form of empty space. Raised on television, I spent what must have amounted to years doing nothing but staring silent. I watched the flickering images in a state of quiet contemplation. Meditating. Today I live in a place that is completely opposite from my suburban origins, yet the life I live is not dissimilar to my life as a child. Staring into nothing, the blank white page before me. Like a doll watching nothing but the peaceful movement of time. I want my perspective to be entirely objective, but I need this separate space to stamp my personal thoughts upon. This division is emotionally comforting. I am wholly creating myself at this moment, my spirit dangling, ecstatically pierced by the tip of a pen.
    Today I fill my days doing domestic chores in the house I share, managing a boutique in town, visiting my mother on weekends, and spending as much time with myself as I can bear. All my spare time is consumed with writing. My novel. What a self-satisfying idea. But that is what I am determined to make. I used to talk for hours with my housemates, discussing what it means to be conscious. This is a world of philosophical thought I’ve lived most of my life without. During these past few years living here, I thought that I would never run out of the breath necessary to go on with a new idea. But now I’m sick of talking. Creating nothing out of spent breath. It’s time to reflect and make concrete solutions out of my conclusions. I sit in my room alone and feel suffocated, weighted down with thoughts of my past. I am determined not to emerge from my silence until I have my past sorted out correctly. I’ll recreate my life through The Story of Paul and June.
     For a long time now, I have worked steadily at building a relationship with my mother, a woman strange yet so familiar. My father is lost to me. If I could forget my parents, I would. I’ve learned that we’d better learn to live with what we can’t shake. I want both my parents to inhabit fully the roles they need to fulfill. Somewhere in my life my parents became more like acquaintances, as if now that I am an adult I no longer need them to inhabit their parental roles. The people we keep close to us are not always physically accessible. When they are not, they remain at the back of our minds as guides and mentors. This is where I place my father, although the validity of his presence is questionable. What ensures that the father is wiser than the child, especially when he seems like a stranger? In my childhood, my parents were more peculiar to me than they are now. Though their physical movements could be calculated with complete certainty, their thoughts were indecipherable.
     I think now that my parents had a bad relationship. It seems that their marriage was a sham, but maybe I’m mistaken. What can I know for sure? I am never certain of anything. And in truth I believe that it’s none of my business. There were no fits of rage, no drunken, lascivious tales of debauchery. It wasn’t broken in the way you would expect a bad marriage to be. There was only the slow spiral of familiar routines. Neither of my parents seemed entirely discontent. They merely functioned, endowed with something so mechanical that I had trouble distinguishing them from the typical mothers and fathers of the evening sitcoms. Only my parents were less precise. My mother pawed at her face while making dinner as if her every feature was being scrutinized and rated. She took the time to look in the silver-mirrored back of a clean pan to check that her bangs were feathered properly. She drew a long red fingernail over her cheek and flicked her eyelashes behind her glasses, ending with a quick pout of the lips. These actions were purposefully self-conscious. She wanted us to see just how much she cared about looking perfect.
     Meanwhile, Father sat dutifully, meditatively, at the table, waiting with hands folded and chin nestled between his knuckles as white dishes of peas and mashed potatoes were laid before him. The peas looked plastic in their buttery gleam, a stark contrast to the fleshy mashed potatoes. He watched the table, my mother’s apron, and the hanging spider plant. He appeared to be a proud father. He was. Only rarely did I see a break in this confidence that revealed the worry hiding beneath the competent father’s stare. Both my parents’ appearances were so meditated, it was almost criminal. They watched their lives as through a camera’s lens and saw their kitchen as if it was a disconnected box floating spectacularly through the heavens. The present moment of a forkful of beef was an advertisement for the nutrition and hardy well-being of the future. The polite gesture of passing the salt was a recommendation of civility. The understanding that they existed as a display eclipsed the moments of our quiet family meals. Mom was the enforcer of this rigid austerity; Father was grudgingly dragged along. It was because of his apathy that my contempt for him grew. In the few rare moments he did choose to involve himself in my life, his presence seemed entirely unwarranted. His lack of willpower made him the source of all my infantile hostility. I willingly disobeyed him as if I could shock him into living. I tore and mangled his neatly folded newspaper. I laughed inappropriately when he was stricken with a bad case of gas. I ignored him when he called me. Despite such efforts, he remained steeped in a quiet apathy for a physical life. He planted himself within our living room as if it were a giant sarcophagus.
       I never wanted to be anyone but myself. My parents wanted me to be the best person that I could be. There is a conflict here older than anyone can remember. A necessity for a crutch exists, an idealistic body that can be used as a shared reference point. For my family, this was the television. We did not literally compare ourselves to the characters on the television. We evaluated our own identities and discovered subtle relations between qualities of living. Of course, at the time I just thought this was all there was to family life. Every night after dinner, for as long as I can remember, we sat in the television room and watched without end. My father liked to laugh after returning home from the insurance office. All day long he questioned other fathers’ competencies: What will happen to your family if your house burns down? You get robbed? You have a stroke? He sold paranoia and confirmations of inevitable tragedies. After years of this kind of talk, he was wound tight and lived in ceaseless fret. By the time he made it to his stuffed brown chair in front of the television, he was ready to laugh himself to sleep. About an hour and a half into the programs, Mom and I would hear the tidal snore from Father’s direction. We would look at each other and smile, finding genuine comfort in these peaceful moments. Mrs. Cleaver hands Beaver a slice of pie.
        Mother wore thick glasses. From an early age, I believed she saw the world differently from the rest of us. One day, when she was taking a nap on the sofa after reading a few chapters of her latest book club selection, I took the glasses from the coffee table and tried them on. The room swirled in fat shapes and became blurred at the tips. I wondered what it was like to see the world that way all day. I looked at our family photo through them. Father’s grin became a long gray twist. Mother’s stomach thinned to invisibility. My eyes in the photo grew larger than my head, the brown pupils blurred into my eyebrows. I thought she must have fun seeing all of us that way. It must be like living in a funhouse mirror. I turned from the picture to find a long, white shape staring down at me.
       “Lucy, why don’t you go play with Susan?”
       The glasses were taken off my face and the world resumed its orderly appearance. Suzy Space Pilot was someone I loved. She was four years older than I was, but our mothers bought milk and raisin bread from the same grocery store. They’d walk the aisles together, discussing desserts while squeezing grapefruit. Suzy and I would trail behind, picking out the crackers and candy that we tried to sneak into our mothers’ grocery carts. But if we left their aisle, my mother was the one who would shout for us. This embarrassed me and I’d walk grudgingly behind my mother, frowning for the rest of the afternoon. I hated how my mother belittled me in front of Suzy. I felt like a little girl, boring and stupid. I only felt like myself when I was alone with Suzy. I grew to love her inside the green-tinted spaceship. This was a makeshift tent we’d construct out of her bed sheets in her room late at night. We draped the sheet between her small closet and bookcase. Then we stole the little elephant lamp from the family room and lit it underneath. It created an iridescent little shelter. It was the perfect spot to make our secret promise: we’d be the first people to walk on the moon. And when that bastard Armstrong did walk on the moon, Suzy vowed to be the first woman to reach the moon.
      Sleepovers were almost always at her house. That’s where our launch pad was. Occasionally, we’d spend an afternoon or evening at my house watching sitcoms while Mom served us pigs-in-a-blanket. My room was a pink cloud. The walls were coated in pink paint.
       “The elephants flew into your room last night,” Suzy whispered.
       “What?” I asked.
       “They landed on the walls and I swatted them with the fly swatter. I squashed hundreds of them. That’s their brains rubbed all over the wall. I bet you never knew an elephant’s brains are pink,” Suzy said with a ghoulish grin.
       She always tried to frighten me because she knew the walls’ brightness annoyed me. The color inspired Suzy; it oppressed me. The pink mixed with the other household stimulants: Father painfully keying the piano (an instrument he never learned to play), the heavy scent of Pine Sol, the unsettling feel of a shag rug. These elements unbraided my imagination. I felt the slow sinking as if I were diving into illness. Drowned by Pepto-Bismol.
       So, we’d run to Suzy’s house. That was where I felt inspired. Her mother was eccentric in her thrift. At my house, we’d be served crackers, cheese, and milk in the afternoon. At Suzy’s, we’d be fed bananas dipped in peanut butter and a special homemade drink her mother called guava juice. Suzy’s room was where we played most often. It was here that she would later inform me about what it meant when boys “got hard” and how to get out of class without getting into trouble. But during our childhood, this is where we fantasized. Instead of paint or wallpaper, Suzy’s walls were covered in birthday wrapping paper. Her mother had superglued it flat. However, evident ripples remained and it had come undone at some corners. The paper was of bubbles or balloons (we never could decide which)—huge, illuminated globes glinting on their sides a faint yellow-white. They varied in color, but were all light and fluorescent. I loved Suzy because she helped me escape. We floated in these globes, driven by the scathing duck-and-cover light. We sailed over the dinner calls and neatly ordered suburban landscape. Witches of the North.
        “I’m in the air. I can see our houses: little square Monopoly houses. There is so much green and brown. The earth is made of green and brown.”  
        “I’m flying to the sun. It’s brighter than anything. I’ll catch on fire. I’ll turn into light.”
        “The birds are flying around me. They think I’m just like them. They don’t know I’m a person. Nobody can tell me apart. I’m a bird. I’m in the sky.”
         We jumped up and down on her bed, shining flashlights on the walls. The blinds were drawn, so only thin patches of daylight entered the room. All I could see were the lights streaming around me as I flew in the air. I was in the sky. There were no limits. Inside I felt a surge of warmth, as if my weight and thoughts had dissolved into pure heat. My life raced before my eyes in a series of still pictures: a happy home, family, and life. The images spiraled upward into the colored shadows on the ceiling. We collapsed onto each other, our faces puffed out red and eyes streaming with happy tears. We waved our flashlights at the ceiling.

ORDER Enough by Eric Anderson

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