04.30.2008 / EP. 5
I Can’t Remember
Milly was dismayed. Carrie surely didn’t expect her to describe her wedding night. She was teasing her, provoking. She knew Milly had packed her emotions in a crate and never let them out. A woman’s wedding night was too private, too emotional to discuss. Besides, she’d forgotten what had happened.
“I got married yesterday too, remember?” said Carrie. She appeared wistful, as though she and Milly suffered from the same disease. She trilled abruptly, then grimaced. “I married your brother. We’re family.”
“I suppose we are family,” Milly replied not ironically. “Welcome, sister.” Facts trickled back in slices like a Picasso painting. Milly had forgotten the multiple wedding and couldn’t tell whether what she now recalled, or thought she did, was accurate. She felt tossed on a moral sea in a storm, unable to see land or control her surroundings. She wanted a mooring and there was none. Without knowledge of last night, she lacked a platform from which to judge this morning. Absence of the past shrouded the present and future in impenetrable fog. She walked blind, groping hopelessly, couldn’t plan or act, despaired of understanding the simplest event.
Milly let logic flood her mind and before it the tide of emotion receded. It’s only panic, she said to herself. As if the word were a solution, she slowed her breathing. This was Milly’s method to resolve panic attacks. She became a vast empty chamber in which rhythmical calculations took place. It was safe. The procedure had served Milly well in the past. And now, in that echoing rational space, Milly reflected that Carrie liked laughter, especially liked making other people laugh. Good. Milly would laugh. But her life to that moment was largely opaque. Why had Carrie married Milly’s brother? Milly couldn’t recall.
They were walking briskly to Carrie’s car, a low-slung convertible. “There are people who’d like to frame you for murder,” Carrie said without preamble.
Milly stumbled. “What murder?” she asked.
They got into the car. “Has the Tylenol kicked in?” asked Carrie.
“I guess. I’m numb.”
“I can understand that. Me too.”
“From the wedding?” Milly asked.
Carrie laughed.
“What murder?” asked Milly.
Carrie’s cellphone rang.
May 2nd, 2008 at 9:10 pm
Maybe Milly is really trying to get out of a stifling job in a world where you have to lie and steal just to get by. Not to mention sell yourself in more ways than one. She’s repelled by it, repulsed; the so-called real world has sent her over the edge and everything we’re reading is just the stuff of her bitter nightmares, what cynical dreams are made of. Politics in the US is a landscape of soundbites. Where are the smart idealists applying first-class minds to actual problems? Democracy? More like a monied aristocracy. On the other hand, who are we kidding. It’s just a book, right? HRC will come galloping to the rescue. Or Obamamania will come save us all. And Milly will fade to smoke and dust, a wavy curtain of dreams and illusion.