62 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
important. Profound. Life. The green
of their new leaves, the small, white
buds, the bright-yellow eyes, even the
dried brown chrysalises she pinched
with her shears.
She never much liked the flower,
but it is useful, dependable, resilient.
A friend. What does she even mean
by this? she thinks as she clips. She
cannot keep her own thoughts, her
questions, straight, and random sen-
tences, odd sentences, float around
and sometimes surface, like the vague
answers to what she used to ask her
Magic 8-Ball alone in her bedroom
in Greenville, with its orange shag
carpet and wallpapered walls, bright-
yellow daisies. Daisies!
Will I be married? It is decidedly so.
Will I be famous? Don’t count on it.
Will I have a girl and a boy? Can-
not predict now.
She remembers Greenville as a
long hallway leading to her bedroom
with the daisies on the walls, and
empty afternoons watching soap
operas, eating snacks. Her parents al-
ways elsewhere.
Did they talk through a dog? Gin-
ger Stanhope, her therapist, had re-
cently asked.
We had cats, she said. A joke, but
Ginger hadn’t laughed, Ginger not
exactly the laughing type.
She sees Ginger on Tuesday morn-
ings, sitting in her son’s room, better
light, waiting to be let into Ginger’s
space, or face, as it were; Ginger a
younger woman with a habit of tilt-
ing her head and squinting as if the
words, Mary Jane’s words, were ex-
ploding particles—waves? pockets?—
of light.
Ginger’s office is God knows
where—this is all very new—an or-
chid strategically placed on a low con-
sole behind her, a door leading out.
Occasionally, a child’s voice can be
heard in the distance, or someone
playing the cello. Mary Jane suspects
that Ginger’s claim to the title of ther-
apist may be a bit tenuous, an under-
graduate degree in sociology or a year
of study at Teachers College, but at
this point, eight months in, it would
be rude to ask.
We all hold trauma, Ginger had
said last week. Every one of us. In
our bodies, in our knees, our toes, our
pinkie fingers. Ginger lifted her fin-
gers and wiggled them. Trauma?
What did Ginger mean, trauma?
Hadn’t Mary Jane been speaking of
other things, of her childhood, of the
vacation she took with her father to
Elk, the half sister and half brother
cavorting with him ahead on that
walk, the fury she had felt? What
would happen if she flung herself off
those cliffs in Northern California,
bounced to her death, dashed on the
rocks below, the jagged boulders that
did not hold even an inkling of a seal
or the suggestion that a seal had ever
been there before—her father might
as well have promised mermaids,
or sirens—the rocks black as pitch
and as furious as the ocean, the tu-
mult of clouds?
She had told Ginger only this: how
she had stopped to look at the frenzy
of weather, to stare hard, forgetting
everything and forgotten when she
turned around and saw her father
moving on with his other children, a
grown boy and a grown girl who
looked nothing like her.
Trauma? Mary Jane had said to
Ginger. It’s just a story.
M
ary Jane and Daniel awoke to
rain this morning, rain that
lashed the trees and pelted the win-
dows, flattened the tulips and daffo-
dils, knocked the gutters. Everything
rearranged. Angry. Mary Jane even-
tually found her muck boots and an
oilskin jacket in the back of the hall-
way closet. If one knew nothing about
her, it would not have been unrea-
sonable to imagine that she was on
her way to the stables, or to grab a
wicker basket and her favorite fly rod.
She had always had that way about
her, Daniel thought, watching: wind-
swept, rushed, a cup of black coffee
in a Styrofoam cup.
Where are you off to in this
weather? He might have asked, but
he knew better; he knew the answer.
Lately, she has a vision of what can
be accomplished in a morning: she
digs holes for annuals, moves stones
from here to there, crawls on hands
and knees to divide the perenni-
als—the lilies and the irises, which
are so packed in, she’s complained,
they rarely f lower or even sprout,
their roots a tangled mass, dormant.
You’re wrong, he had said to her.
She’d walked out of the bathroom,
looking for something. It was that
long when I met you.
Oh, her hair, he means. Yes, she
said. I suppose.
You used to wear it wrapped up
on the top of your head, or covered
with that bandanna.
I remember, she said.
The pink one.
Yes, yes, yes, she said.
Couldn’t he see she had things to
do? My sources say no.
I liked it when you wore it loose.
Talk, talk, talk. You could not shut
the man up.
But that was then, in the bad
weather, before the storm cleared and
the sun broke, rainbows undoubtedly
somewhere, before this purple late-
spring sunset. Now she’s come in,
again; he’s looked up and she’s here,
again, waiting, his wife, Mary Jane,
M.J. for a time until they both grew
bored of it, or simply forgot why M.J.
had ever felt dangerous and slightly
sophisticated, the two of them kids
in front of that judge in Chicago,
Mary Jane barely showing in a mini-
skirt, heels, her beautiful arms bare,
her red hair past her shoulders, loose,
a crown of dandelions on her head,
stitched earlier during the picnic
they’d shared in Grant Park before
heading on a lark to the courthouse.
It had all seemed a lark: the judge,
marriage, forever. Now she stands
here waiting, shears in hand. She
has said something to him, a request
or a demand, a question. Daniel tries
to remember.
I mean, I’m asking, she says.
What do you think? Do you have
thoughts? she says.
Were they barefoot before that
judge? It was a bright summer day,
and someone, a clerk, had tucked a
white carnation in the lapel of his
Goodwill suit, its smell rank and
sweet.
Yes, he says. I do, he says, then the
judge concludes the script from which
he’s been reading and waits for the
newlyweds to embrace.
NEWYORKER.COM
Kate Walbert on entanglement and separation.
