"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 8
by Matthew Gasda
Happy Holidays to all our readers and subscribers!
We continue this week in serializing our inaugural contest winner’s novel, Seasons Clear, and Awe, by Matthew Gasda. New subscribers can catch up with the previous chapters below:
Submissions are open for our next quarterly contest, whose deadline is January 21st, 2026. Finalists are awarded $500, and the Winner $1,000. We’re excited to announce that, due to subscribers like you, it’s free to submit for the foreseeable future. Spread the word (and throw your hat in the ring!).
As ever, if you support what we’re doing here at PILCROW, please consider offering a paid subscription.
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
“Seasons Clear, and Awe” chronicles three decades in the life of the Gazda family, whose children inherit not wealth but something more dangerous: their parents’ unlived ambitions and their mother’s gift for psychological dissection. As Stephen and Elizabeth grow from precocious children into neurotic artists in their thirties, Matthew Gasda reveals how post-industrial, late 20th century America created a generation too intelligent for ordinary happiness, too self-aware for decisive action: suspended between the working-class pragmatism of their fathers and the creative and spiritual aspirations of their mothers, capable of everything except building lives.
Matthew Gasda is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of many books, including the recent novel The Sleepers and Writer’s Diary.
⚬─────────✧─────────⚬
2010
Stephen unchained his bike from the fence that wrapped around to his building on Genesee Street in Syracuse, New York. Kicked away the stand and, standing up and resting on the handles, started to pedal uphill towards campus and the University Library, which were less than a mile as the crow flies away. It was the first week of school of his senior year.
He loved September and October in Syracuse before the unavoidable opulence of a long snowy season; and he was dimly, and intentionally so, aware that the kind of freedom he had now was not permanent (which his father’s persistent questions over the summer about what he planned to do only underscored); so there was a dissonance in the feeling that life was good (and it was) and anxiety that couldn’t be this way forever, or for very long.
Stephen wanted to watch Criterion movies, read poetry, philosophy, fiction, travel, flaneur; he didn’t want to work; he considered most kinds of work beneath him.
His mother, unlike his father, was supportive (at least of his goals and potential to turn intelligence into meaningful talent), though she also reminded him that she had worked all through college.
And wasn’t that Stephen didn’t work (he had mowed lawns every summer and landscaped), it was the attitude he took: that every second he was doing that he could be reading or thinking.
And though he didn’t tell his parents this, he felt he had to make up for an inadequate education, which had emphasized sports and secondarily music and history, while leaving everything up to his public school, where he only really encountered serious books his senior year in AP, when his favorite teacher, Ms. Bird, introduced him to Joyce, Shakespeare, Dante, Eliot, and encouraged him to read Harold Bloom and to think of himself, and his era, with the same intensity and quasi-religious determination that those writers saw theirs.
Stephen’s best friend from high school, Dan Boettner, was a year younger, and graduating with Stephen’s sister, at the top of the class of 2008; Boettner was now at Vassar and Stephen had just returned from the Vassar parliamentary debate tournament (which Stephen, frustrated by losing close “out” as in “knock out” rounds, decided would be his last) where he and Boettner had gone for a long walk around campus and talked about Nietzsche, who Boettner had become obsessed with and planned to write his senior thesis on.
—I’m planning to do nothing but learn German and read the entire collected works and then write my thesis in a week, Dan, who was extremely gaunt, and had a very limited, monkish diet, claimed.
Stephen was on the fence about whether to write a thesis, but Syracuse wasn’t the kind of school where it really mattered. The literary hipsters and film kids and the like were a campus minority; and Stephen wasn’t even in the Syracuse honors program, which was astounding considering his intellectual pretensions.
His strategy was one of elevation and withdrawal; it was just an accident he went to Syracuse (he initially applied and was accepted to a “music industry” program because he wanted to be a music producer (briefly because he had taken playing in a band very seriously in high school), but had dropped out and switched into Philosophy at the beginning of sophomore year (spurred partly by coming into contact with elite debaters from around the east coast all of seemed to have something to say about Hegel and Kant and utilitarianism and the veil of ignorance), and been very happy with his decision.
His father, however, had been confused, though his wife didn’t let him express overt disapproval, that Stephen had left a vocational program (that would have required Stephen get at least two “industry” internships his final two years) and had chosen something as (selfishly) impractical as Philosophy.
But Stephen was Stephen, and that meant doing what he wanted to do, following his heart, and his vague, undefined, sense of vocation.
Music, and writing and recording songs; he and his bandmate Mike had labored over hundreds of recordings in Mike’s basement where Mike’s dad, who owned an autorepair shop and used to play, or rather still played, in hair metal bands had built a small recording studio. Stephen played keyboards; Mike played guitar; they had bass, rhythm guitar, drums (the 5 man setup of Radiohead, as they had self-consciously known), but it was Mike and Stephen who wrote and arranged the songs and had overseen the major recording decisions.
But music had faded in importance for Stephen, though he still played in an (what he considered inferior band with the gay-baiting named “bears” that sounded vaguely like Animal Collective and was more “experimental”, and literature, and the larger domain of letters, fueled by his friendly competition with Boettner, which was adjudicated largely through emailing stories and poems to each other, and then responding via physical letter, was more and more important (along with a growing interest in filmmakers like Fellini, Bergman, Godard, and Antonioni who Stephen saw as an extending the literary tradition).
He had considered deferring a year to follow his ex-girlfriend Finley, who had broken up with him, to London, where she was studying abroad, and teach at a Berlitz school, but had realized sometime around July that he neither wanted to be with Finley back, to live abroad, or miss his graduating with his class, and that, given that he only needed two classes to graduate, he could and read books and, as a consequence, he had quit the debate team which he had started, and this parliamentary debate team which he had started, and was president of and sketch comedy which was, felt increasingly lame, and had dedicated himself to writing poetry, writing letters, reading, inquiring sexual experience, and watching Criterion movies which he burned from Netflix DVDs and stood up in a plastic Tupperware next to the entertainment, the TV stand in the apartment he shared with his roommate, Drew, who planned to go to law school and spent most of his time in his room and with whom Stephen got along quite well, as long as they maintained the unspoken banter of sharing the living room and kitchen for less than an hour a day.
His share of the apartment, rather, the share that his mother and father paid, was only $420, thanks in part to the housing and stock market crash and the general dilapidation of the area surrounding Syracuse. The building, though, was pre-war, sturdy, and in good shape. Stephen’s room was small, just enough for a twin bed and a little desk with his typewriter, but the living room was big, and he brought his green recliner from his bedroom in Bethlehem. There was space for bookshelves. There was also a large dining room with an Ikea kitchen table where he worked on his laptop, with a view to a shady tree in the parking where crows liked to gather in the winter. In the winter, which started early in Syracuse, he could watch the snowfall through that window.
He kept a fairly strict routine. Aside from waking up relatively late, at 10, he would make green tea, oatmeal with blueberries, write a poem or put a fragment on his typewriter, go for a five-mile run, come back, write a letter or work on a short story, or read. He only had class two days a week. He would also work on Rosetta Stone, French and Italian. He tried to watch a movie twice a week. He also went to the gym on campus regularly. He thought it was strict, nearly raw veganism (heavy on fruit, nuts, vegetable juices and kombucha). Morning steal-cut oats were his only cooked meal of the day.
Stephen had also discovered that at some point in college, he had become what both men and women, including his roommate who he suspected was gay, considered beautiful (a poor man’s Alain Deloin, even). He’d never had bad skin, but he’d never really stood out in high school, or been marked as attractive (which he resented because he considered himself attractive in a classical sense); he didn’t fit the jock archetype that attracted girls in high school, nor the frat-jock archetype that was still paradigmatic of masculinity at Syracuse. But he’d found a more masculine self-presentation, ironically, through letting his hair grow longer, eliminating all sugar and junk food from his diet, and just dressing differently. That change was influenced by the summer he spent in Florence after freshman year on the Syracuse program. His look was self-consciously European. Gone were sneakers, a buzz cut, t-shirts, baggy jeans, the generic Pennsylvania look of his adolescence.
He hadn’t found Finley, his sophomore and junior girlfriend, to be very particularly attractive, (to the point where he was almost embarrassed to present her as his girlfriend), but they’d had an amazing sex life, at least relative to what he’d known before (which was maybe a sum total of three hours of sex with two other women across freshman year, when he’d lost his virginity).
Finley was very, very smart, and loved to read and she was responsible, and decent; if he’d wanted to, Stephen could have married her and been happy, in a certain sense (and there might have been good sense in that; but his father had married his college girlfriend and Stephen resisted doing anything his father had done). Finley had chosen Syracuse over Princeton because she’d received a full ride and research money, and had a condescending attitude toward almost everyone else on campus, except for a few of the other kids with the same scholarship she had, who were also on the debate team, and Stephen himself, who hadn’t been a good student in high school and had only gotten into Syracuse because he got a perfect score on his verbal SAT and a strong recommendation from his AP English teacher.
But Stephen had turned himself into an intellectual in college and had won all of the writing awards his junior year by submitting honestly under different fake names, including his own name, that he could have finished both first and second. He’d become a well-known, if eccentric figure on the APDA debate circuit, had acquired impressive mentors, Fred Beiser in the philosophy department, and Dympna Callahan in English, and maybe most importantly, carried himself like he mattered in some way: a Shelleyan dreamer amongst bros and biddies.
Thus, his relationship with Finley, distinguished by their intellectual superiority over the rest of campus, and tastefully high libidos, had been an orgy of English novels and foreign films and unplanned, spontaneous sex wherever they found themselves; if she had been more beautiful, as beautiful as the women Alain Delain or Marcello Mastrianni seduced in black and white movies, Stephen might have maintained the relationship longer.
But during the winter of junior year, he, at first, ended things, though they quickly found themselves sleeping together again, driven together, again, by the lack of culturally and morally appropriate matches; but then Stephen slept with a sophomore on the debate team, Maureen, who was objectively hotter, or objectively hot, and from California, and that had marked the end of the relationship,
By summer, Finley had severed the relationship completely, after meeting a Columbia Law student, Tim (with a job lined up in corporate law), who was also an Irish Catholic conservative like she was, and, who, though he was gangly and awkward, had, as Finley made sure to tell Stephen, an enormous dick.
Bird Library was a grey, seven story modernist building, ugly inside and out, at the foot of campus, south of the quad; Stephen spent much of his free time there, and was, he felt, one of the few people who actually spent time in the stacks; much of the groundfloor had been converted into space for desktops, printers, and there was a coffeeshop just inside the door.
Today, however, Stephen was going to browse through the stacks, or read, he did, have a date, or something, a hang, in the coffeeshop area, which, though it was drab and grey like the rest of Bird, had the best access the large, front facing, floor to ceiling glass windows that got excellent sun. There were much better, ie real, coffeeshops off campus, in the Westcott neighborhood (settled by hippies in the 1970s, occupied by hipsters and graduate students and professors’ families now) like Melo Velo and Recess, which was in an old house, but Stephen’s date, Kristen, who he’d met the previous week in “The Philosophy of Education”, had to be on campus for class, and couldn’t meet him anywhere cooler.
Since he’d met her, or even before, Stephen had masturbated to Kristen, a punk from Buffalo, who had short blue hair, pale, clear skin, and a great body, and had indicated, not unsubtly, in their twenty minute conversation walking around campus, an interest in both boys and girls, and a casual relationship to sex in general. He’d never really had sex with someone he’d fantasized about before, which was a strange thing to admit to himself; Melissa, his high school girlfriend refused to have sex for religious reasons; Kelly, who who he lost his virginity too (and who he’d fucked again on a trip to the beach with his high school friend group) had been sort of a buddy, a nice girl who admired him, and who was cute; Finley; and even Maureen hadn’t really been a fantasy because she had thrown herself at him (because he was older maybe and because she was trying to get away from guys she met through her sorority, which is at least what she told him).
Stephen, basically, was much less sexually experienced, then he would have liked to admit; Finley was his only consistent partner; and he learned how to fuck by being with her, but he had never really experienced anything... pornographic.
Kristen was already there, at a table near the window, in the sun (to his relief) in a black leather skirt, and a black tanktop, which she was wearing without a bra. She was reading Baudrillard’s America, which Stephen found funny for some reason.
—Hey, Stephen, who was wearing an oversized blue oxford with the sleeves rolled, chinos, and leather loafers (all thrifted), said. —Thanks for meeting me.
He was also wearing brown, thick rimmed Italian frames, which he fiddled with unconsciously (as he swore they were always slightly tilted or uneven).
There was a certain sense in which he was finetuning a persona that had been in development for the last eighteen months or more.
—Hey Kristen said. —Thanks for meeting me too.
She had a lower, more masculine voice, and he didn’t know if this was an intentional choice on her point, or her natural register.
—I’ve never read any Baudrillard; most of my classes have been like analytic or history of philosophy.
—He’s pretty great; you should borrow this when I’m done.
—Sure, I’d love that, Stephen said sincerely.
—So what’s up?
—Not much, road my bike up here, went for a run earlier, wrote my friend a letter this morning.
—You write letters? That’s cool.
—Yeah I really believe in it.
—Would you write me one?
—Sure.
—Where are you from again? PA. You’re from Buffalo right?
—Yeah, good memory.
Stephen realized that Kristen was a little more shy than he’d imagined; she kept nervously looking out the window, avoiding eye-contact, but in a way that suggested that she was into him.
—And a full Philosophy major, or?
—Um, minor. Women’s Studies major.
—Oooooo, Stephen said with mock horror.
—I would say fuck off, but it is pretty bad, but I’m almost done with it.
—Yeah we’re all kinda locked in at this point.
—I’m glad you talked to me, Kristen said, I wanted you to talk to the first week, but you didn’t.
—You seemed intense and maybe potentially a lesbian.
—I’m sometimes a lesbian but.
—Not always, Setphen said matter of factly.
—Not always, Kristen said, smiling, flirting.
—I’m gonna get a coffee if you don’t mind.
—Yeah I just have to go to class in a little bit.
—Okay cool.
Stephen went to the student-barista, and came back with a black coffee; he never added any kind of milk and especially not sugar, as he had stopped ingesting anything other than fructose after going through a major depression after his sophomore year; that was when he’d started really exercising, changed his diet, read obsessively; certain things, like a grain of sugar, for instance, represented some kind of backsliding into indiscipline and melancholy.
He had found it embarrassing to be depressed, and he considered depressed people weak; he had defeated his depression, hadn’t he? It had only taken a few months.
The Bird library coffee, via whatever chain ran the operations of the in-library coffeeshop, was bitter, not very good. Stephen didn’t mind though, as the tall waxpaper cup gave him an achor for the conversation; besides, Kristen had a cup, and he was feeling a little mentally sluggish and tired after running and biking.
The first few sips emboldened him. —I wanted you to talk to me, too, for the record, by the way.
—Yeah you were like staring at me while the Professor was talking about Rousseau, and I was like he is either really bored of Emile or like, down.
—I love Emile, great book; was just like distracted...
—I’m having a party tonight, you should come; or like, my roommates and I are having a gathering.
It was Thursday, a party day.
—Yeah that sounds great, Stpehen said, playing it cool. —I’ll be there. What time?
—Like after eight.
—Great.
Two weeks later, Stephen, who was lying on the floor of his sister’s Alston apartment, looked up from his copy of Wordsworth’s The Prelude.
—You wanna go see a movie? he asked through the open door.
—Yeah maybe, whatdya wanna see? Elizabeth asked from the kitchen, where she was cooking something (she was an amazing cook according to everyone).
—I dunno, what’s playing?
—Have you seen Melancholia yet? she asked Stephen, who was a senior at Syracuse, and because he was only taking one class and had quit debate and sketch comedy, he had nothing preventing him from visiting her.
—No, I haven’t. Not sure I want to. I dunno.
—I’d go.
—It looks reductive.
—Pretentious.
—No, she’s depressed. We get it.
—Come on, Steve.
—No, really. I mean, I’ll go see it… I just feel like.
—What?
—I’d rather watch an old movie. Are there like other art house places in Alston or Cambridge?
—Yeah of course.
—Like within walking distance.
—Or we could bike.
—Is there another bike?
—You could ask Troy, Elizabeth said, referring to her roommate Lydia’s boyfriend.
—I don’t wanna be reliant on that guy. He’s been so passive aggressive since I arrived; it’s not like he lives here either. Like.
—Stevie… that’s not true actually… unfortunately… he moved like last month officially; he does actually pay rent.
—Fuck, whatever.
Elizabeth studied her brother: he was arrogant, self-possessed, and knowingly pretty; he’d become so much better looking since he’d stopped eating junk and fast food. Someone in his philosophy club at Syracuse had given him books by Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey, futurists who didn’t want to die or age; now he took supplements, drank six cups of green tea a day, mostly ate raw fruit and vegetables and drank raw milk. Elizabeth, ironically, had stopped being a vegan and had started experimenting with meat from the farmer’s market she biked to in Cambridge; Stephen was resistant to meat, had all sorts of (fallacious, to her mind) arguments against it.
—He’s not such a bad guy, Elizabeth whispered, about Troy, feeling guilty. —He’s just sort of weak.
—Weak is bad.
—To you.
—No, generally.
—He’s sweet to her, Elizabeth offered, meaning Lydia, who was so much more attractive than Troy.
—He’s obviously possessive and manipulative.
—To each their own.
—You don’t like him either.
—Yeah but when I hear you trashing someone, I instinctively take their side.
Stephen smiled: he and his sister were always matching wits, tastes, perceptions; this (modifying judgements) was her way of differentiating herself from him.
They were both majoring in philosophy at their respective colleges (he had gone to Syracuse; she was graduating from BU). He had also been on the debate team and never let her forget that he had beaten an otherwise good BU parliamentary team at Nationals during his senior year, which, Elizabeth couldn’t stress enough, didn’t mean anything to her. She didn’t enjoy competitions, intellectual or otherwise. She wasn’t sure why Stephen was so obsessed; there was a hint of a moral flaw there.
Elizabeth had a religious sense of herself, of the soul; and she extracted from others the same degree of moral guilt that she felt in herself.
Stephen checked his flip phone. There was a text from his Syracuse roommate.
Emmett just said: okay.
Stephen had said he’d be back in two days, hoping that Emmett’s girlfriend, Claire, wouldn’t linger. Because as soon as he left the Bushwick apartment, she would. She would take over. And Stephen would feel displaced. The apartment was too small for three people to live there comfortably. And it frustrated him because he didn’t really know how to confront people and avoided it.
Stephen saw that both he and his sister allowed themselves to be in the position of passive-aggressor in their living arrangements. Elizabeth had to deal with Lydia and Troy; Stephen had to deal with Emmett and Claire. The siblings were condemned to dealing with the young bourgeoisie pushing out and shaming their incipient bohemian tendencies. Elizabeth couldn’t play guitar late at night. Stephen couldn’t type on his typewriter in the living room late at night. The noise woke other people up. They couldn’t have too many gatherings or small parties. They could barely sneeze.
Didn’t these young couples know that they were boring, in a factual and obvious way? Didn’t they understand the ironic juxtaposition of their values and their choices? Emmett played in indie bands. Lydia was a painter. Shouldn’t they know better? So why did they attach themselves to Troys and Claires? Two cumbersome and shortsighted partners sacrificing their own wildest and most romantic tendencies.
According to Elizabeth, Lydia used to be a neo-hippie and wore flowy dresses and slept around and went to music festivals and had group sex and took mushrooms. And now she and Troy cooked dinner together and had sex twice a week. They went to her parents’ place in Newton every Sunday for dinner.
But the siblings didn’t share these thoughts with their roommates; they politely encouraged them while privately, in their world of two, sharing their secret reactions, their secret scorn, their romantic readiness to reject the compromises of their peers.
—Have you been home at all? Elizabeth asked.
—No, I haven’t, not since I drove up to school in August.
—How’s Calvin? Elizabeth asked, referring to a dog, a Morkie, who was five and a half.
—Still neurotic and hostile and freaks out at the mailman or anyone else who isn’t a member of the family. Still cute, despite.
Elizabeth yelped. —I miss him so much!
—Yeah, I don’t know, it’s weird going home, Stephen continued. —Sometimes I’m not really sure how we all got to this point as a family where we’re all kind of operating as individual agents. Autonomous, but without any real depth of feeling for family life. I mean, like, I assume that’s how other people are in Bethlehem.
—It’s hard to quit Bethlehem entirely, Stephen added. —When I go home, I’m so comfortable.
—Yeah, me too. Although Boston is somewhat of a bigger Bethlehem.
—Yeah, Boston’s nice.
—It’s very cozy and nostalgic. It’s like a big college campus. I don’t know if I’d want to live here as an adult, though.
—No, I definitely wouldn’t.
—Sometimes I also really hate the WASPiness. It just feels super alien to me.
—It’s deceptive. I go to Lydia’s house for dinner in Newton and it’s just like oh my god. It’s really an incredibly cold environment. There’s none of the warmth of an immigrant household. There’s not.
—I guess I used to feel that way about Finley’s family in Albany, Stephen said, referencing his ex-girlfriend, who was now in med school at Yale. —Her dad just watches the Golf Channel and plays golf, which honestly isn’t that different than Dad, except for, like, this attitude of patrician indifference to everything. This upper middle class solipsism. I came away fucking depressed by it.
—Guess you’re glad you didn’t get married to Finley, Elizabeth said, deadpan.
—Yeah, I’m very glad.
—I’m not really sure I understand what it was about Finley that you liked.
—Well, she was extremely smart. And extremely secure. Even though she wasn’t particularly attractive. And I guess I enjoyed being mothered, Stephen emphasized the ‘othered’ in mothered, hitting his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
—Yeah, that’s a problem you have. Stevie. You expect that from women. Including me.
—I know, I’m sorry.
—Just clean up after yourself, you know?
—I try, well...
—Do you? Elizabeth asked, arching her eyebrows.
—My version of cleaning up.
—Okay, but that’s not...
—Okay, just tell me what to do when I’m here, okay? Stephen said, —Don’t get hostile.
—Yeah I just worry, Elizabeth said, —Dad feels kind of out at sea with retirement….
—He’s been on my case a lot about getting a real job after I graduate and I don’t know what to tell him. It’s not 1975.
—No, it’s not.
—But there’s no way to convince him.
—No, there’s not, Elizabeth said, smiling slightly. —At least not that I know of.
—I mean it’s kinda depressing. Just like gulf, this disconnect… Stephen scratched just inside his ear. —I don’t even know how to communicate with him about the things I care about; there’s not even a real starting point for that discussion about like poetry. Like how am I gonna tell Dad I care more about Wordsworth than getting a landscape job? Not that I would mind working a landscaping job… at all actually… but just like the sense of moral imperative he has about it: there’s no way I’m going to care about it.
—Giving advice is how Dad relates to us.
—I know but…
—It just is, Stevie.
—It just makes my stomach churn a little bit like… knowing that there’s no way to like… I mean Dad is always gonna be like this; there’s no way to break through; there’s no amount of brilliance that I can display to convince him otherwise.
—Don’t display brilliance then. Just be respectful.
Stephen saw hints of some deeper frustration; his sister didn’t like his attitude; she was judging.
—It stresses me out, Stephen said, —and I’m never going to have his support, but I don’t know why I want it. Should I want it? I feel like I can’t get away with the same things that you do.
—I’m the golden child, Elizabeth said.—You know what your problem is, Stephen? Mom set you up never to have any consequence or she always depended on you. Maybe overall I’m the golden child, but it’s not like you don’t get what you want.
—I don’t even know what I want… Stephen trailed off. —An apartment in New York with my own bedroom. Stephen was splitting the bedroom with Emmett, dorm room style.
—Mom and Dad couldn’t afford that even if they wanted to.
—I mean, they could help, not very much.
Implicitly, Stephen knew that his sister was on his father’s side, not intellectually, but in terms of sense and virtue. Impulse and moral molding.
She was rule-following, courteous, doggedly hard-working the same way that her father was. She could be obstinate. Hated improvisation, hated imperfection like their father.
Stephen was like their mother, he hated rules, always hated following along, liked leading and pace-setting, doing things his own way. Elizabeth assembled the IKEA bookshelf in her dorm room. Stephen needed his parents to do it in his Bushwick apartment.
More than he was willing to acknowledge, Stephen’s indifference to social gatekeeping and vetting meant that he acquired lovers and mentors and believers and many friends; he naturally created a cult around himself (going back to when he started a band in high-school), unlike his sister, who tended to keep to herself and to a very close circle of regular acquaintance. Stephen had no belief that he could properly build his own life, a life with the necessary and dependable structure like his father and mother and grandparents, all of whom worked in a steady way their whole lives. His parents had both had jobs from 15 on: his mother as a waitress; his father in the ‘throwing mills’ (whatever those were, Stephen wasn’t sure).
Stephen mowed lawns every summer. $15 an hour, four hours a week didn’t amount to much. He didn’t like employment. He knew himself to be superior to employment and thought of ruses, ways of inventing, ways out of it. He did not look forward to graduating.
—Do you want some ginger tea? Elizabeth was always making infusions and loved to experiment with herbs. —I chopped some ginger up, it’s in the fridge.
—Yeah, sure, I’ll have some.
Lydia and Troy were in Lydia’s bedroom now.
—I think I’m getting a cold. Elizabeth said. —So I’m going to get out ahead of it.
—Yeah, me too actually. I think. Maybe it’s psychosomatic because you said that…
— You get sick a lot. Elizabeth said.
—I know, I think I should probably be done being vegan. But it’s addictive, weirdly.
—Yeah, I’m so glad I switched.
Elizabeth, who had started drinking raw milk during her year abroad in Germany and eating meat again, said. —I feel so much better.
—Being protein deficient is probably like fucking me up.
—Just stop. Elizabeth said sharply.
In high school she’d been the one who converted to vegetarianism and then veganism first, forcing the whole family to remove meat and dairy from the fridge. Stephen and Michael had gotten their own fridge in the basement. But over time, once he got to college, Stephen had converted first to vegetarianism and then to veganism and then to raw veganism (inspired by a Wordpress blog called ‘Raw Model’). And now he was beginning to reverse the process, eating cooked foods again, considering fish and dairy if not animal flesh.
—I might.
—You go so all in with things; balance is good.
—You’re one to talk.
—I used to be… more extreme… Elizabeth stuttered to justify. —But I don’t think that was the way.
Stephen scanned his sister’s face; she was mysterious, opaque: always had been; the innersprings were buried so much deeper in her than they were in him. He felt so much more transparent and naive than his younger sister (sometimes). He envied people who didn’t say what they meant, who didn’t blurt things out, who didn’t produce their ideas through dialogue, but through careful inward contemplation.
He had learned to be like this from his mother, who always complained that she never felt certain of anything; he had grown up dialoguing with Adele, learning to cast doubt on everything, believe nothing for certain; Elizabeth had rebelled against Adele, had developed a religious cast of mind, if not a religion.
—Do you want to go see Tree of Life? It’s playing at 8:00, Stephen said. —I looked it up earlier.
—I already saw it but I’d go again.
—What did you think?
—It’s brilliant and made me sad.
—You don’t have to go again; I could go by myself.
Stephen was being passive-aggressive and needy.
—No, I’ll go with you; I don’t want to get cooped up at home.
—You’re not gonna go to John’s tonight?
—No, we’re fighting.
—Okay.
Elizabeth was markedly and pathologically aware of her brother’s princely selfishness, his hypnotic way of getting other people to do small things for him in such a way that they wouldn’t be fully aware that they were actually serving him and not themselves. This ability came so naturally to him, too, that he couldn’t even be said to be fully responsible for it. It was second nature, third nature, first nature: nature all the way down, the nature their mother had encouraged him to cultivate. Even when Elizabeth forced him to acknowledge this event, he didn’t really see the need to give it up; the is did not, for him, imply an ought; if he incorporated other peoples’ energies in his own projects, it was for the greater good: he had vision; others didn’t.
Elizabeth could feel herself becoming the opposite of her brother. They got older, became adults, and started to differentiate and split off in more concrete ways: her complexity, her compulsions, her unconscious urges. From the top of the pyramid, she looked down on herself and recognized that all of her irrational fears and hang-ups were connected, on a symbolic level, to this deeper fear of being like her brother, of being selfish, of not following the rules, of not being good, of failure in a way.
She had to be good; unconsciously and consciously, she had to be good. She had to wash her dishes thoroughly; she had to make her bed; she had to be monogamous; she had to get an internship; she had to get good grades; she had to study; she had to work hard. Stephen didn’t work hard; he wasn’t loyal to women; he didn’t make his bed; he didn’t enjoy doing the dishes; and if he did, he would do so begrudgingly and leave little traces of grit. At moments she felt like she hated him, and she did hate him. No, she loved him, he was her best friend. All these things could be true.
—I’m not getting hostile. Are you getting hostile?
—No.
—Okay, bunghole, Elizabeth said.
—Okay, bunghole, Stephen said. —You know I’ve been reading this book, Stephen continued, reaching into his leather backpack which he’d left carelessly on the couch, called ‘Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives’ by the Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, some Serbian monk or something... and it’s got me thinking... There’s this passage about parents, saying how you should never dishonor your parents; how the elder regrets disrespecting his father who was a meek and good man, and I couldn’t help but thinking about Mom and Dad, but Dad in particular.
—He’s been hard on you lately.
—Oh yeah.
—Why? I’ve been kinda checked out.
—Just like living in New York and not having a ‘real job,’ and obviously like my general disinterest in doing the things that he did.
—Makes sense.
—He doesn’t get it, I guess.
—What do you expect him to get? He has been working since he was 15 and nothing was given to him.
—Okay, yeah, that sounds harsh, Stephen said, sullen.
—I’m just seeing things from his perspective, Elizabeth said, starting to cut an apple on a wooden cutting board on the dinner table, to eat with organic peanut butter she’d picked up from the co-op she belonged to.
Stephen got up from the couch and sat down at the table, taking a piece of apple and a butter knife Elizabeth had placed next to the peanut butter, and began to apply one to the other.
—He makes his perspective quite clear to me very frequently.
—Well there’s maybe a reason for that, Elizabeth said scornfully.
—What reason?
—That you never want to listen to anything he has to say.
—It’s a battle of wills, yeah.
—Just let him win something; throw him a bone.
—I’m so much like him in so many ways, but he doesn’t see that.
—Because Dad is rules based; esoteric parallels don’t matter to him.
—Elizabeth, I really don’t know what to do; I don’t really know how to square my goals in life against his expectations. I mean, which is typical, but.
—You don’t have to justify anything of this to me, I’m just sayin.
—Do you have to work on your paper tonight? Or can we see that movie or something.
—I got another extension; I dunno.
Elizabeth had chronic anxiety around finishing her papers going back to her freshman year; this anxiety had only diminished slightly in four years, and had become almost something of a habit, an old friend; anxiety was part of the process of thought and composition.
—Just knock it out.
—Okay well here we go again, but I don’t do things like you Stephen; I can’t just toss off an eight page paper on Gauguin.
—You can totally toss off an eight page paper on Gauguin; last year I wrote my whole thesis in like a week. Or less. Four days.
—And you said it was garbage.
—Yeah, I got a B which is insane for a capstone. But guess what, I fucking graduated and it doesn’t matter.
—I’m pretty sure it matters.
—It had zero effect on my getting my debate coach job; in fact, caring more about debate than certain classes paid off.
—Okay, good for you.
Stephen watched his sister’s face harden; there was always some element of the unknowable in her psyche; she surrendered to moods and impulses in a way that he refused to. He remembered visiting her the previous spring in Dresden, where she’d spent her entire junior year, right after he had graduated, and how paralyzed she could become in certain moments. He remembered sitting under a tree in a park with a bottle of wine with her, on a warm evening, watching joggers, families, other students swarm around them pleasantly while she balled her fists up and hit herself in the head, whispering, —Life has no meaning, life has no meaning, life has no meaning...
They’d had a long talk, and Stephen worked every possible philosophical angle, deployed every possible trope to try to bring his sister around to his Romantic existentialism: godless, god-filled, spontaneity-loving, poetry-loving; but she was only half or a quarter listening, having sunk into some deep, mental bog like a lost Viking weighed down by armor and weapons.
He didn’t want his sister to die or to suffer, but he was also simply uncomfortable with her suffering; at the time, unconsciously, he had needed to cure her of melancholy to prevent his own infection.
The same threat remained now: that she would turn, sink, disappear into an anxious, obsessive fit, and that he would ignore the contents of what she was going through to restore equilibrium as quickly as possible.
—Can I ask you something, Liz?
—Sure go for it.
—If we could each trade one personality trait, or like, swap one trait, what would you swap with me?
—I would take your boldness and you should take my attention to detail, she said immediately.
—That seems too obvious.
—I just think it’s the right answer.
—We should work together on something music related, Stephen said.
—I don’t think that would work out.
—Why not?
—Because we write songs very differently.
—But that’s what I’m saying; what if we synthesized.
—I don’t really like the music you write, Elizabeth said bluntly.
—You’re more talented than I am in certain respects, but I actually get things done; and like, I dunno.
—I don’t want to sound like Radiohead.
—We don’t have to.
—Maybe.
—I’m sort of over music, Stephen said —By and large, but I think we could do something really interesting together; like have an interesting side project.
—I thought you wanted to write novels.
—I wanna do both.
—Focus wouldn’t kill you.
—It might, you never know.
—I admire you for working so hard on the things you care about, brother.
—Thank you.
—But I worry you’re spreading yourself thin.
—How so?
—You should choose between like music and literature and film or just get a real job... or ... like, I do feel like you get inspired by something and you try to absorb that whole artist’s style or purpose without digesting it properly.
—I think that’s age appropriate behavior.
—It’s massively egotistical.
—Okay so what?
—It’s not real art.
—Give me time.
—I’m just warning you.
—Feels more condemnatory than that.
—It’s just a suggestion.
—I gotta do things my way.
—Literally you always do.
—Let’ssss change the subject.
—Okay.
Stephen rolled over and stood up, placing his book on the dining table, which was neatly arranged with a vintage tablecloth, candlesticks, and china: Elizabeth’s aesthetic: old, ornamented, simple.
Everything Elizabeth did had this touch. If you dropped his sister into a forest, she would make a home, chop the trees herself, build a table, and find a way to get a white tablecloth, a candlestick, and a simple rug with an old-world pattern in red, blue, green, and yellow. Those were her colors. His sister seemed so out of place here—here being 2010, here being Boston, here maybe even being in his family, in the Gazda family. Stephen thought she belonged in the Worpswede of Rilke’s, the colony where Rilke and his wife lived in 1901. She belonged in the old world, in the pre-World War world, much more than he did in a way. He was more habituated to the modern and the present, and willing to try to conquer it.
Elizabeth seemed only half awake in the modern world, and it seemed like the greater part of herself was sleeping and dreaming of something deeper and ancestral, like she hadn’t cut a spiritual umbilical cord and had continued to receive nutrients from the deep past. Stephen was more charming and easier to get along with at a party, but it was Elizabeth that people really wanted to hear from and gain approval from. Stephen followed up with new friends and cultivated their friendship. Elizabeth would wait weeks or months to decide whether to answer a text message and actually initiate any kind of relationship.
Elizabeth strode down Commonwealth Avenue in a white dress and a gray peacoat because the weather had turned autumnal, and there was a drama to her steps, so she didn’t really know where she was going. She’d hit upon some taboo in her psyche and broken it. She had to see John, her boyfriend (plus her brother was stifling her, and annoying her, spreading over every surface in the house, not washing dishes properly, leaving his books and notebooks on every surface, judging her, asking her questions). And even though it was true that she felt more whole when her brother was nearby, rather than when they were now talking after some philosophical or psychological battle or disagreement, he was overstaying his welcome, which she knew was because he hated his roommates in Bushwick, Dan and Ellen and Becca, who were typical hipsters who didn’t take his writing seriously or him seriously any other way, probably because he was ashamed of the fact that he didn’t really have a job in Brooklyn yet except as a debate coach at a private school, and that their mother was sending him enough money to buy food every week, and because every few weeks he would publish a poem in some tiny journal that paid him $25, which he could claim was proof of his genius, and because he was also always trying to get her to come to New York to record vocals on the bedroom dream pop that he was making with Joey, their friend from Bethlehem, who had taught himself engineering and mixing and composing, because that was the only creative job you were allowed to involve yourself in if you were from Bethlehem, the only non-gay job:indie music.
She had to see John, though; he was texting her; she’d been ignoring him for a few days, or he’d been ignoring her; it was unclear. The relationship always had these wild transferences of energy and control and power; sometimes John had it, sometimes she had it. It didn’t really matter; what mattered was the fact there was agency and power and control to be had, or to be lost.
The problem with John was that his whole personality was a strong defense against a feminine attitude. And sometimes he even told Elizabeth about his dreams, which revealed as much defense against his cold, domineering German mother, Heike. And between Elizabeth herself, who could be in her entire demeanor cold and domineering too; but she felt that she was forced to play this role, forced by her own mother, by her grandmother, her great-grandmother she’d never met, and by men: her professors, her boyfriends, her brother, her male friends like Nick and Boettner, who were in love with her but who’d always blame her for their own sexual passivity and inability to ever really make a move. Maybe the fact that they were secretly gay or bisexual or something, the fruit could explain the fruitlessness of their attempts to seduce her or any other proper woman. Because that’s what she was: a proper woman.
The corner store was open. She went in, bought two boxes of candies, stuffed them in her purse, and left. The candy was for later, when she was back home, when Stephen was asleep, when she would have to start working on her paper again late at night, and when her stress and cortisol would be high. The candy would come out. It kept her calm. One box of chocolates, one box of Starbursts. This was a quasi-feminine behavior: secretiveness and sweet tooth and staying up late at night under the influence of the moon to write on her clean tablecloth with a candle going, longhand. She never typed a paper up before she wrote it first longhand.
There were so many nights where she didn’t sleep, and she loved to not sleep. She could become very wild and aggressive, and she could give in to things that she couldn’t give in to in a biologically normal state. She could break through the old resistances and sense of powerlessness. She basically could become more like Stephen, who didn’t ever respect any kind of restraint or boundary or rule. And she could stop hating herself and him and stop envying him. And she herself exchanged powerlessness for power and rule-following for rule-breaking.
The German house are along the river; she turned left off of Commonwealth.
All Elizabeth could think about was making John feel what she felt, bringing him into the occult world of her own moral despair and forcing him to take responsibility for the way he made her feel, which she never would do (literally never would do under any circumstances), just like her mother, just like her brother. Only her father would listen to her. Only Michael would say, —I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry. Adele and Stephen would never stop justifying themselves, and they would often support each other, understand each other’s logic, make it so that she could never be right. John, well, he wouldn’t do anything. He would just deny that anything could ever be wrong at all, that there was anything such as suffering in the world, that she could possibly be upset at having to suffer because it wasn’t real. Suffering was like God: unprovable, unknowable, something above and beyond reality. How could nobody care about how much she was suffering? It was unreal.
The Charles looked, and was, inviting.
It seemed so nice to sink into the cool black water, like falling asleep and starting to dream.
The beautiful world of the unconscious.
Maybe drowning would be like waking up in another life; would lead her to wake up in another life. The world of the unconscious that she held at bay. The oceanic feminine world that she had been taught by her mother to control and to master, just like she’d been taught to hide all disagreeable things and to become a normal person. Her mother had taught her to be normal and to be neurotic at the time time, meaning she existed between two irreconcilable mental points. Had taught her, in fact, that she was neurotic, and introduced the literal language of psychopsychoanalysis into her conversations with her daughter. Adele had asked and practically demanded that.
Elizabeth, get a therapist. Adele had given up her therapist in Philadelphia when she moved back to Bethlehem to get married and had spent the next 21 years asking everybody else to go to psychoanalysis and talking to everyone else like they were both patient and doctor.
The ideas of psychoanalysis and family life were meant to compensate for the uncured neuroticism of her family, which, of course, in turn, only increased it. Now Elizabeth wanted to die, wanted the awaiting fatal destiny to greet her. Or no, she wanted to go to John’s dorm in the German house and scream at him. To penetrate into the real meaning of the relationship, just like she wanted to penetrate into the real meaning of death. If she had been allowed to be with Papa in the hospital the night he died, then maybe she wouldn’t have this urge. Maybe she wouldn’t be so angry at her mother. Maybe Arturo would have transferred some knowledge to her in that moment of transition. They would have cured her of her fixations and her obsessions.
