THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 59
riage Story,” “It feels very familiar. Just
trying to wrap your head around your
parents not being together anymore—
and not only that but you’re moving to
the Midwest. Like, the first time seeing
my father cry, as we’re leaving. It’s just
all those very raw feelings that stick with
you that you don’t articulate.” After the
divorce, Driver’s father left the church,
and he now works at an Office Depot
in Arkansas. While shooting “Marriage
Story,” Driver said, “something I thought
about all the time was the things that
my dad didn’t do that this guy does in
Noah’s movie. The fighting to get cus
tody”—he took a long pause—“was
moving to me. My dad didn’t do any of
this. He didn’t put up a fight.”
Mishawaka was a jolt. “We were
living with my grandparents, and that
sucked,” Driver said. “I mean, they
were nice.” His father had shown him
grownup movies such as “Predator” and
“Total Recall,” but his new classmates
talked about “Saved by the Bell.” Nancy
got a job as a legal secretary in South
Bend (she is now a paralegal) and re
connected with her highschool boy
friend, Rodney G. Wright, who drove
a cab. With Nancy’s encouragement,
he became a Baptist preacher. He also
became Driver’s stepfather.
Driver began to pick up on strange
tensions in their religious community.
At Twin City Baptist Church, the pas
tor refused to officiate at his mother’s
marriage ceremony, since she had been
divorced. Around the same time, a girl
in the Youth Department accused the
pastor’s wife of being a lesbian, an as
sertion that split the congregation and
led to screaming matches that Driver
struggled to comprehend. “I remem
ber this idiot yelling at my mom, say
ing, ‘No wonder your husband left
you!’” he recalled. “Only recently did
I realize, Oh, I hate organized things,
because I feel like I’m missing some
thing. I’m being told it’s one thing,
but it’s actually something else.” The
family soon joined another church
nearby, where Driver’s stepfather be
came the preacher.
There wasn’t much to do in Misha
waka, a bluecollar town that had been
devastated by the demise of a Uniroyal
plant. As teenagers, Driver and his
friends Noah and Aaron would climb
radio towers or set things on fire.
(“Leaves. Clothes. Tires. Things like
that, that you have to really douse,” he
said.) They would dumpsterdive be
hind a potato factory and feast on ex
pired chips. They rented movies from
P. J.’s Video, down the street. “Because
my parents were religious, we wouldn’t
watch any of these movies in the house,”
he recalled, so he would go to his friends’
houses and binge on Scorsese and Jar
musch and “Midnight Cowboy.” “I
started to form opinions on what was
good and what was bad, through con
versation with those guys.” The first
time he saw “Fight Club,” he said, “I
felt kind of sick. It made me feel very
strange. But then I watched it again al
most immediately.”
In the woods behind a Kroger su
permarket, the trio made camcorder
Precise in their prissy,
handwringing way,
flies are by our lights
filthy, walking in shit,
though light, light on your brow
is their sixfold grip.
*
Some things in a life
happen once, but then again,
some happen twice.
More weeks away,
and I strode into my kitchen—wrong,
dark at noon,
its one window
inwardly black,
flat black with flies.
*
They are necrophiliacs,
sure, but shriven in passing
through the strait white gate
of a fly’s egg, maggots,
though they turn our stomachs, come out
pure as magnets.
So much more pointed than a scalpel’s
is their distinction, cell by cell,
of dead from viable flesh
that surgeons defer to their soft mouths
to clean wounds,
so hard and true it is
to leave life carefully behind.
—James Richardson