Part 94: Susan

Banned. That’s what she had gotten for her efforts: banned. Susan repeated the word with morbid fascination. She had expected to come back (after dinner, after dishes) to a few interested comments and questions, some evidence that she had moved some minds, prodded them along the great conveyor belt of understanding. Maybe some hostility or misinterpretation such as Freud (the subject of last night's documentary) faced - before he was Freud, before he could pull off "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" and had to spend all his time saying it wasn't. She would have even accepted a touch of light censorship. Deleted posts didn't faze her. But not an outright ban.

What could be a clearer sign that it was time to drop this whole little charade, to establish this in her personal history as a singular, unique experience, with clear start and end dates, something to look back on wistfully, to marvel at, to speculate about. (“When was that, again? Well, it was definitely the springtime, oh and it must have been 2007, since that’s when James was in eighth grade. And just to confirm - yes, that’s when The Letter was released - oh, and look, they’ve released four more albums since then, I haven’t thought about them all this time and still they’ve kept on going, how strange.”)

Young people didn't want revealed truths. They wanted to construct them. That was always the case, but for some reason she thought it would be different here, when the truth she revealed was that all truth was constructed.

But fine. Let them go through the whole process only to arrive at where she had already been. She had written it better in college, anyway, when she was surrounded by the right stimuli. Perhaps that was growing up: a gradual shift from future tense to past, from I will write to I have written. Sad, yes. But maybe beautiful, too?

So what did that leave for her now? James was in the kitchen, doing the dishes (he had insisted); David floating around the first floor, not having settled anywhere yet, like a butterfly or a bee; Becca on her knees at the coffee table, alternating glances between the TV and some worksheet. Neither together nor apart. The natural state of a family.

Susan’s place was over there, with Becca, but not to help with homework - what good was knowledge anyway? All it earned you was exile and ostracism, and it did nothing to stave off death. (She was Socrates; she was Prometheus.) It provided nothing permanent, only the illusion of solidity. Better to appreciate ephemerality, to sit in the glow of the ever-changing screen, with her fickle, impermanent, temporary child.

The volume on the TV was set to a low hum, so that you could only hear it in the living room proper, and it was on one of those neutral, single-digit channels. (The only channels they had when she was young, but why romanticize deprivation?) Becca’s attention was not divided fifty-fifty, Susan determined, and right now it was the worksheet (Summarizing a Story) that had the edge. Another victory for her parenting, along with the sound of the running sink and contented humming from the kitchen, and yet - a failure of the education system, training children to believe that stories had a single meaning, something that could be picked out of a lineup. No wonder they bristled when you challenged them, complicated their understanding, said a cigar can be more than a cigar even if the smoker says it’s not.

“ . . . and finally, tonight, we have an update concerning music producer Bobby Melrose, who has been--” Susan reached for the remote, tapped the volume button a few times, watched the report with rapt attention.

“Oh, wow,” she said, speaking to the room - to whoever responded.

“What?” David appeared around the corner and alit on the couch.

“You know Britttni? The singer?” She was the famous one; to everyone else, this was a story about her.

“I don’t think so.”

“Of course you do, come on. Becca, what’s that song she sings?”

“Who?” Becca looked up, her concentration finally broken (by her, not the TV, Susan noted, a reminder for the next time she felt like chastising her.)

“Britttni.”

“Oh, the one that’s like--” And here she broke off into a tuneless, lyricless rendition of a song Susan was pretty sure was called “Fight Night,” or something with lots of those sounds in it at least.

“I don’t know it,” David said, shrugging. “But anyway, what’d she do?”

“You do know it,” Susan insisted. “You just don’t know you know it. And this isn’t exactly . . . well, you know.” They shared a look, a laugh.

Becca kept singing, in a loose sense of the term. The sounds of running water and drying dishes ceased. James was coming into the living room, joining the family, drawn in by the conversation. This was it, Susan realized, this was the image, the moment of domestic tranquility that she had always wanted, that she would remember when they were grown up and moved on. (So there was a present: here, at the intersection of past and future.)

“You know I’m not really a music person,” David commented.

“Sure, but, like, you go out in public. You’ve heard it in stores and restaurants. It’s a very popular song.”

“What song?” James, who was a music person, who wanted to mark himself as different from his father.

“That Britttni song,” Susan answered. “The one your sister’s singing.”

“You like Britttni?” James said, addressing Becca. For the first time in who knows how long: not compelled, not transactional, but an actual sibling interaction. How important for them to have a relationship, at least a call-on-holidays relationship, after she and David were gone. It would mean they had accomplished something; it would mean some little shard of this family-thing still existed.

Becca shrugged. “Everyone does.”

“But is she, like, your favorite singer? Or is she someone else’s?”

A collision of worlds: in James’s, your identity was built on what you liked; in Becca’s, who you liked and who liked you. To James, music was personal, possessive; to Becca, it was communal, atmospheric. Susan wanted to watch the clash, the misunderstanding, the negotiation of terms. It was like a battle scene for postmodernists; her version of David’s Sunday football games.

But it didn’t happen, except in her mind. Becca didn’t bite, just shrugged again, so James - clearly procrastinating something - circled back: “Why are you talking about Britttni?”

“Oh, she’s suing her manager. It was on the news.”

“Suing for what?”

“Doing his job, probably,” David muttered.

How ignorant, making a judgment like that, sounding so certain without knowing the facts. Obviously it was more complicated, things were always more complicated. Susan had watched the whole news story, and she had background knowledge about Bobby Melrose, and yet she wasn’t claiming to understand the situation. Humility, that’s what it was, the real lesson of postmodernism, when you really got down to it, Derrida and all of them (no other names sprang to mind), that’s what they were really saying - don’t think you know anything, cause you don’t.

But James faced a crossroads here: would he side with her (although she hadn’t made her argument yet) or with his father? Which was stronger, ideology or gender? He'd been oscillating between the two lately.

“She says he’s been mistreating and manipulating her,” Susan explained. She says - good. Mulitiplicity of narratives. Not like that damn worksheet, which Becca had returned to. “And I’m sure he would say, like your father said, that he was just doing his job. But there’s a fine line between, you know, managing someone and being controlling.”

“Maybe she needs to be controlled,” David said.

Of course you're TB, she thought at him, and suddenly it seemed that was the great divide between them, between the two types of people in the world. All distinctions were really that distinction: simple/complicated, denotation/connotation, modern/postmodern . . . 

“You can’t actually control people, though,” she responded, irritated. She was aware that she was the more passionate in the interaction and strangely self-conscious about it. “Maybe it looks like it’s working in the short-term, but people always resist.”

“What about mind control?” Becca piped up.

“Mind control isn’t real, honey,” David said dismissively, surely picturing pills and potions and chips in the brain.

“Sure it is!” Becca insisted. “We learned about it in school. There was an assembly.”

“What kind of assembly?”

“Okay so like--” Becca knelt up straighter, readied her hands for gesturing -- “if you ever don’t feel good, you can just smile and it’ll actually make you feel better. It’s science and everything. And then like, if you smile at other people, you make them feel better, too.”

James laughed - no, scoffed - and dismissed himself from the family discussion. Some invisible line had been crossed, some threshold reached. That would be him all his life, Susan realized in a flash. Standing on the edge of the group, scoffing, leaving; sending the message you’re so wrong I can’t even begin to explain why. And as David pressed Becca for more details - part father, part taxpayer, hungry for a glimpse of what went on inside that school, so opaque, so foreign to him - James slunk back to his old spot, as if he knew it was only his again, and settled back in to his evening routine.