People are such a commitment.

—Melissa Broder

H

er traveling companion’s college flight left earlier than Penelope’s. Someone not Penelope would have continued to explore castles, towns and curiosities never again to be seen, but Penelope opted to return to the coastal bed and breakfast where she and her only friend in life had stayed at the beginning of their wander and there to wait out the remaining week before flying home. Because this was the end of Penelope’s travels, funds were extremely tight. After the come-with breakfast, Penelope bided her time until two p.m. when she walked to a small shop and bought a packaged pastry, the last of her caloric intake for the day. To eat up time she walked, walked, walked the misty shore, drizzle or no drizzle, and repaired early to bed with a fat novel. On the second night of her stay, her reading was interrupted by a knock on the door and an invitation to head out for some “nightlife.” Penelope declined; the inviter withdrew; Penelope finished the chapter and, stomach yowling, went to sleep. The woman who had poked her head inside Penelope’s room the previous evening must have spotted Penelope from afar on the drizzly beach—obviously American, Penelope was supremely spottable—and soon fell in step, offering a native’s view of the queen, the prime minister, the parliament and the historical and ongoing mistreatment of the working class. She was very tall with very red hair. She was Penelope’s age. She was ebullient, gregarious, a dyed-in-the-wool mingler who did not mind drizzle. Penelope walked faster, then slower, on the crunchy sand. She stopped and stared broodingly at the churning sea. She failed to answer questions or answered evasively. None of these tactics dampened the other’s enthusiasm for her company. To avoid sharing the breakfast room, Penelope began waiting until the last seating, her stomach outraged by the delay. To avoid predictable patterns, she began to vary the hour of her afternoon snack, yet again outraging her stomach. She gave up sea walks. Because she now remained in her room for much of the day, she finished the fat novel early, her carefully calibrated routine thrown completely out of whack by friendly overture. “I’m afraid, love, you didn’t quite enjoy this visit,” the proprietor said when Penelope checked out, ruefully leaving behind the finished novel. She would have nothing to read on the train or plane. People not reading looked available to chat.

There is nothing spiritually easier than
being in opposition.

—Rebecca West

Adele’s mother was a “have to” mother. According to Adele’s mother, on an almost hourly basis, Adele had to do this and had to do that. Take out the trash. Clip her fingernails. Pay attention. Speak in full sentences. Stop picking at the mole on her leg. Avoid bacon—because Adele’s mother had become convinced (utter nonsense) that her daughter had developed, sometime between the ages of ten and twelve, an allergy to pork. Adele’s mother’s endless, self-replicating “Have To” list had caused Adele to wonder what sort of mother her grandmother had been—specifically, if Adele’s mother’s mother had also been a “Have To” mother. Wondered, but did not follow-up. What did a dead grandmother have to do with her lot? Possibly quite a bit, but Adele was too young to go in for extended generational comparison. As it was, Adele spent far too much of a finite lifespan crafting deflections she would have uttered had she not been, by and large, a cooperative daughter. Spitting mouthwash into the sink, she parried: “No, Mother. I don’t have to do anything except . . . breathe.” Applying acne creme, she challenged: “Mother mine, I believe you are confusing necessity with choice.” On a perfectly unextraordinary Monday, neither mother nor daughter besieged by migraine, menstrual cramp or indeterminate funk, Adele’s mother pointed to her daughter’s head and declared that Adele had to wash her (not all that oily) hair instantly and, while at it, had to apply extra conditioner to those proliferating split ends. Ask yourselves: who can predict at which point rebellion will kick in and claim its due? Neither shampoo nor conditioner touched Adele’s strands for three weeks running, despite ferocious mother/daughter rows. In the mirror, Adele saw the visage of a savage cave girl emerge, one who would have been too busy hunting, fishing and starting smoky fires to bother with hair maintenance. Her scalp itched like a flea farm; still the cave girl look grew on her. She had begun to appear, to her notion, quite fierce.

What is the malaise? you ask.

—Walker Percy

It was this morning’s job, family assigned, to take his aged aunt to the hairdresser’s and afterwards, should his aunt be inclined to show off her smartened-up self to an unrelated public, to the coffee shop that served coffee at the scalding temperature she preferred. Sky analysis was slowing the operation. Once out the door of her garden apartment, his aunt planted her feet and stared balefully upward. “Ominous,” she said, referencing the sky and not (he hoped) his attempt to, hand beneath her elbow, hurry her along. Ahead were fourteen increasingly elevated steps to the street and thereafter the further challenge of comfortably situating his aunt in the passenger seat of his Prius, run through the car wash just yesterday to avoid the importance-of-taking-care-of-one’s-things conversation. “Ominous,” his aunt repeated. Until he affirmed the sky summary, all motion would remain suspended. Dark clouds expanded above them. The sun was not to be seen. The dreariness also filtered down, both boxwood shrubs and Bermuda grass sporting a gray cast. “Whatever’s blowing in from the Gulf won’t be pleasant,” his aunt said. “No,” he said, meaning yes, the coming weather would not be pleasant. “But it should hold off till afternoon,” he added, as if speaking as a trained meteorologist. His aunt redirected her scrutiny. “You miss my point,” she said. He did not think he did. The longer they stood still, the greater the threat that grayness would further saturate his aunt’s already gray hair and deepen the grayness of his crewneck sweater. Soon gray and grayer thoughts would begin to steep; helplessness would drag on his limbs, destroying his posture. The urge to crouch would become overwhelming. Suffocatingly trapped in a gray, gray bubble in which all speech in rotation echoed, he would cease to view struggle as noble, fulfilling or compulsory. Gradually breathing would become a chore and he would forget to blink. From the top step, his aunt scolded: “You’ll make us late, nephew!” It seemed an insuperable distance: the gray top step, his gray aunt. Tremendous effort would be required to reach either. Also: desire.

The rest is almost history.

– Mary Ruefle

Whenever Octavia left home she felt convinced she would expire before returning. The house she feared never to return to wasn’t much of a house, really. Approaching it after a day away anyone, even Octavia, perceived its limitations and discarnate air of melancholy. There was the busted front stoop. The splinter-wracked porch. Windows that did not live up to the reputation of windows. Around the foundation the limp and straggly weeds seemed infected by the house’s ennui, “robust” not part of their character. And they were weeds. If not a fighting spirit, what is a weed? The spare interior failed to offer up anything to catch and hold the gaze in either pleasant or horrifying fashion. But because, after her demise, Octavia did not like to imagine anyone discovering the house in wild disorder and on that basis generalizing about its occupant, she never left the house without making the beds, sponging the counters, sweeping the floors and aligning the curtains, just as if she were a character in a fairytale fulfilling girl-tasks before venturing out into a deep, primeval forest. Octavia’s actual house stood on a vast, open plain with unimpeded views of nothingness in every direction. It was a landscape with which a poet might equate forever, but Octavia had no poet friends and was not, herself, inclined toward metaphor. Because death workers were death workers, professionally immune to surprise, Octavia supposed they would make little of the terrain or its emptiness, driving the long, gritty path to the house, smoking a last cigarette before arriving and getting down to business—for Octavia had gradually come to accept that she might instead be found where last she lay, listening to creaking floorboards and whistling windows, her tired heart tiring of the pretense that life was good when for Octavia it had not been.