The Summer Without Men

vinegar.
Turds and stout.
What’s this all about?
    She is sane again, and she is in the Burdas’ living room reading a biography of that coy but passionate genius, the Danish philosopher who has been irking and unsettling and bewildering her for years. The date is August 19, 2009.
    *   *   *
     
    I have come round to myself, as you can see. Only a few days have passed since the funeral. I have come round to who I was then, during that summer I spent with my mother and the Swans and Lola and Flora and Simon and the young witches of Bonden. Abigail is lying in her grave on the outskirts of town. There is no stone yet. That will come later. It wasn’t so long ago, after all, and my memory of that time is sharp. Daisy was still with me. In the days previous, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth, Boris Izcovich had been wooing me in a steady, earnest manner and had even sent me an egregious but touching poem that began: “I knew a girl named Mia / who knew her rhyme and meter / And onomatopoeia.” It fell off badly after that, but what can one expect from a world-renowned neuroscientist? The sentiment expressed after those introductory lines was, as described by Daisy, “total mush.” That said, only the most hard-hearted among us have no use for mush or blarney or those old ballads about lost and dead lovers, and only bona fide dunces are unable to take pleasure in the stories of ghostly figures who wander across moors or fields or out in the open air. And who among us would deny Jane Austen her happy endings or insist that Cary Grant and Irene Dunne should not get back together at the end of The Awful Truth ? There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren’t there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.
    And I will tell you in all confidence, old friend, for that is what you are by now, Stalwart Reader, tested and true and so dear to me. I will tell you that the old man had been making inroads, as they say, and tromping closer and closer to whatever it was in there, in me, and the explanation was time, quite simply, time, all the time spent, and the daughter, who was born and loved and grew up into the kooky, kind, and gifted darling that she is, and all the talking and the fighting and the sex, too, between me and the big B., the memories of Sidney and my own Celia, who didn’t need to be discovered by Columbus, I can vouch for that. And in my secret heart of hearts, I admit there was some old mush that hadn’t been scooped out of me by hardship and insanity. But there was also the story itself, the story Boris and I had written together, and in that story, our bodies and thoughts and memories had gotten thelves so tangled up that it was hard to see where one person’s ended and the other’s began.
    But back to the nineteenth of August 2009, late afternoon, around five o’clock. Flora was visiting with Moki, and Daisy was entertaining the two of them with a song-and-dance number. Flora was clapping wildly and encouraging Moki to do so as well. The weather was not good, a swamp of a day if ever there was one, ninety-five and bleary, mosquitoes on the loose after the rains. I was having some difficulty concentrating on my book, what with all the commotion, but I had finally come to Kierkegaard’s broken engagement. He loved her. She loved him, and he BREAKS it off, only to suffer grotesque and exquisite mental tortures. What a sad and perverse adventure that was. When I noticed that Daisy had stopped singing, I looked up. She had turned toward the window.
    “A car’s coming up the driveway.” She leaned toward the glass. “I can’t see who it is. You’re not expecting anybody, are you? Good Lord, he’s getting out of the car. He’s walking toward the steps. He’s up the steps. He’s ringing the bell.” I heard the bell. “It’s Dad, Mom. It’s Dad! Well, well, aren’t you going to answer it? What’s the matter with you?”
    Flora grabbed Daisy around the thighs and began to bounce up and down in anticipation. “Well?” she crowed. “Well?”
    “You get it,” I said. “Let him come to me.”
    FADE TO BLACK

 
     
    ALSO BY SIRI HUSTVEDT
     
    NOVELS
    The Blindfold
    The Enchantment of Lily Dahl
    What I Loved
    The Sorrows of an American
     
    NONFICTION
    Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting
    A Plea for Eros
    The Shaking Woman or a History of My