Sean + Jenny
I. “If you throw another lemon at me, I’m gonna tell Mother!” Jenny half-threatened. For the past 15 minutes, her little brother Sean had been tossing the skin, the flesh, and the seeds of a lemon at the back of Jenny’s head. He lay on the grass under the swing where Jenny was sitting, tossing the dismembered lemon up into the blue sky, watching it ricochet off of the back of Jenny’s head, letting the pieces bounce onto his chest. Sean took his sticky, sour fingers and wiped them all over his white t-shirt and blue and white socks. Sean didn’t actually believe that Jenny would tell Mother. He didn’t really care. Sean knew that the lemons bouncing off the back of his sister’s head were just a trivial expression of his love for her. And even though Jenny was three years older, Sean was aware of the confines of their universe while she was not. Sean would always hold the power because he could deny her the one thing she wanted: a reaction. A reason to hate him. To cast him out. To make herself a pathetic imitation of teenage angst. Brooding. Reeking of insincerity.
II. Turtle dove (ceramic); dollar store pipe cleaners; vintage Leica camera; horn rimmed glasses; signed photo of Babe Ruth (fake); collectors edition of the complete Encyclopædia Britannica (real); unused razor; leaky tap; taoist beads; day-old doughnuts; genuine Morrocan rug traded in Beirut then sold for an inflated price at a crosstown market in Paris (Texas); Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Botticelli’s Spring (Primavera); Krakatoa Eruption, 1888; the scorn of a woman; ‘The Marriage of Figaro,’ On Tape; an algebra problem (in smoke); the promise of winter; the delight of apricot juice in summer; Mother’s veil (virulent); six glass frog figurines; a box of receipts; limited edition San Diego Padres baseball cap (44/104); Father (gone); butterfly wing dust; The Return of the Modernist Painter; lemons (fruit); lemon (man); a cornucopia (bereft); a ring of keys; a Pink Pony Bicycle; The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior, as depicted by the Boy Scouts of South Montgomery, Alabama, Middle School; two boiling pots of water on an unwatched stove; a freshly cut switch.
III. Sean had been unusually precocious and remembered his childhood, more importantly his toddlerhood, in vibrant detail. He had the kind of memory that he could go back to and walk around in. He could conjure faces and places and smells and textures. He was so sensitive to memories that he would get bouts of nausea from the smells and colors and velocities when he thought on them. His memory was heavy with the weight of things he never should have heard or seen, said by adults who thought a three-year-old would have no memory of their conversations. It almost surprised him, the blasé vulgarity with which the adults in his life would speak. “Do you think they’re still awake? Because I could just fuck you on this couch.”
IV. All children perceive extremes of emotion and intensity in their early days of life. They jump from joy to terror to jealousy to guilt to happiness, but end the day sleeping soundly, thinking not. Sean was different. He was kept up at night with images and audio bits racing through his head. By the age of six, Sean had grieved the death of a family of ants, fallen into deep love and then epic heartbreak with the willow by the lake, and experienced utter elation from the sunbeams that crept into his room over the threshold of the window every afternoon. He felt nature breathing around him and often didn’t know where he ended and the world began.
V. Time never held its breath. The books he had read and forgotten did not matter. The innumerable ambitions he had had and lost in the brief period of being a young man, (ages 17 to 23), he ought not to feel guilty about. Sean had known his mother was going to die even before she came back from the doctor that noon in June. He was 23 years old and living in the house down the street when she called, and he knew that the day had come. He knew he was the only one that could bear to stay and watch the slow unremitting process unfold. He did not call Jenny. He knew she wouldn’t stay. In the few but full days he had spent in the sun, he felt both satiated and exhausted from being alive.
VI. Sean searched for Mother’s love as if it were trapped deep inside of her and if he observed her closely enough he could free it. As a child he had studied her for hints of feeling. He treated everything he did as an experiment to see what made her feel, react, smack, giggle, yell, but mostly she did nothing at all.
VII. Jenny ended her search for her Mother’s love when Mother sold the Pink Pony bike. She bought it for Jenny and then sold it as if she were taking the dishes out to dry. She did it with ease that resembled a lack of caring more than it did contempt. Jenny pleaded and screamed and even threatened to run away. She rode that bike every day, but her mother said it was taking up space in the garage and the tassels left tinsel in the yard, and she needed money for the electricity bill. But Jenny knew Mother did it to spite her. She did it just to feel power. She did it because she hated being a mother. Jenny withdrew when she realized this. She no longer fought or asked. Sometimes Jenny forgot to hate Mother. She did remember to hate Sean because of how he doted on her.
VIII. Jenny hadn’t been back since she had left, quietly, five years before. She hated that no one had tried to stop her. They all knew she would leave. Where does a girl with no family go? She could never stay in the same place for very long, but ended up at community college to finish her degree. She even got married before getting pregnant. And she’s still with the guy. She had tried to forget it but the map of her home was scorched into her memory and her movements through side streets over hills were involuntary.
IX. She arrives at the house and feels as if she is choking. Choking on her words and her actions and her guilt. She sees a face, Sean, looking down at her from the window. Face, placid as a lake. The same as before, maybe just a little greyer. Then he disappears from the window and she knows he will reappear at the door. It took him slightly too long. He must have hesitated. She could trace his movement, see the yellowing wallpaper, the trinkets from Montparnasse, the white burns where photographs used to hang. He opens the door, not stepping out of the house, but creating a space for her to pass between his body and the wall.
Come in. Thanks. How was the drive? Fine, good. You look good. Thanks, you’ve done a great job organizing this place, dealing with all this stuff. I’ve had a lot of time. It feels so different here without her. Well, the doctors said it wasn’t too painful in the end. I’m glad to hear it. Nice of you to come back. And what’s that supposed to mean? Nothing. Fine. Okay.
X. Jenny walks carefully through a room teetering with stacks of a former life. She picks a smallish cardboard box. The tape holding the edges together are cracked and dry. She opens the flaps without much effort and retrieves three glass blown venetian vases. The glass bubbles on the surface. She holds the blue vase up to the light and watches the color leak onto the dusty carpet.
