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Conversation | Feb 14 2003

I’m talking with J on the phone, and as I’m talking I’m concentrating as hard as I can on trying to think of something to say to her. We’re having a very nice-seeming conversation, although in truth I’m wracking my brains the whole time, trying to come with the next question, the next topic-starter. The naturalness between us is gone. It’s been this way a long time now. I’ve continued on in the vague hope things will improve, that some small portion of naturalness will return. It doesn’t seem possible this will happen, not now or ever, but then I’ve seen plenty of impossible things happen, and anyway it won’t happen if I don’t allow for the possibility. So that’s what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to allow for the possibility.

When I’m in a fight with someone and feel bad, it often helps if I go to sleep and wake up and have it be the next day. It’s like I put on a new head, as Bernhard says. It’s like my old head disappears and a new one takes its place. In this case, though, J and I aren’t fighting, and many years’ worth of next days have passed, so I don’t think a night’s sleep is going to make much difference.

J told me a story once. She was leaning out the window of her parents’ apartment, looking down at the street below, when her mother came up behind her, wrapped her arms around J’s legs, and lifted them from the floor. For the briefest moment J thought her mother was trying to throw her out the window. It was terrifying. But then her mother released her legs and explained that it was all just a joke. J lost it at that moment, which she rarely does, and started screaming and raving at her mother, who was profusely apologetic. However J’s mother’s apologies only infuriated J more, because in characteristic fashion her mother turned the thing around so that it wasn’t about the horrible thing she had done to J, but how badly she felt about doing this horrible thing. That is, it was somehow about her feelings, J’s mother’s feelings, rather than J’s feelings, despite the fact that J was the one who had had the horrible thing done to her, not her mother.

While trying to think up questions to ask J to keep the conversation going, I remember this story, and it suddenly occurs to me that I’m J’s mother. This makes no sense, of course—I’ve never grasped J by the legs, nor done any such thing—but this is the thought that comes into my head: I’m J’s mother. I’m J’s mother and I just lifted her legs a little, as a kind of joke, and now J is screaming at me, only her screams sound like conversational remarks, a causal bit of catching up after months of being out of touch. I try to respond, to apologize for what I’ve done, I want J to know that I realize how wrong and horrific it was, but what comes out instead are rote questions about J’s life and rote remarks about mine. She screaming at me and I’m trying to tell her how sorry I am, but the words actually passing between us (we’re standing together in the living room all this time, talking to each other on our cellphones) have nothing to do with any of this, or anything, really; they’re just words said to fill the space where words belong.

And then suddenly, as it often happens with cellphones, the reception goes bad, and so we each try moving around the room to see if that helps. First I move, then J, then I move again… As we move, we periodically say things like, “How does this sound?” and “Is this any better?” and “Can you hear what I’m saying now?”