Daphne_A Novel Read online

  For AJB, RJB, and NPB

  yours and yours and yours

  A heavy numbness seized her limbs,

  thin bark closed over her breast, her hair turned into

  leaves, her arms into branches, her feet so swift

  a moment ago stuck fast in slow-growing roots,

  her face was lost in the canopy.

  —The Metamorphoses

  ONE

  WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, I USED TO STAY UP ALL NIGHT with Thomas Hardy.

  That home feels so long ago now. Yet sometimes I hardly seem to have moved an inch. I’m still in my old twin bed, legs gangling off the end. Just thirteen and I was as tall as any of the boys in school. I’d scrunch and bury myself under my comforter and two heavy blankets on top of that. Mom and I lived near the river. The winter wind yowled off the floodplain, shaking the windows, making the frames slab-cold to touch. The shag carpet in my room was moldering to dust, the wood paneling warping away from the walls. I could hear my mother in the other room tossing and turning. Every sigh and groan in that house, every draft and whimper, every scuff on the linoleum and worn-down wale on the corduroy couch—they all seemed eternal.

  But that was not my old home.

  Youth is a wilderness. The mind buds and flowers too quickly to tame. A boy I liked said hi in the hall: a tiny sprout that, by the time I reached my bed, had exploded into lush forest. Even when exhausted from volleyball, I traveled miles before sleep, my feelings snarling brambles, soaring glades, chasms without bottom, the pain always endless, the joy just too much to contain. Christ, adolescence—even the word is ungainly.

  It wasn’t just Hardy. The stack on my bedside table was like geologic strata, layers of girl detectives, wayward babysitters, and dragon-riding heroines compressed under the solemn tomes that, on the cusp of high school, I’d started checking out from the town library. Of Human Bondage, Middlemarch, Far from the Madding Crowd. My best friend, Brook, was already devoted to Sassy and NME, but I felt I had an older, more timeless sensibility, one I was discovering in all of those sonorously titled books.

  Somehow I got stuck on Hardy. Thirty, forty pages could go by, and he still seemed to be describing the same field or the noble visage of a shepherd. But the plots pulled me along: intercepted letters, mistaken identities, sudden riches, groveling poverty, scorned proposals, vows of vengeance. The Mayor of Casterbridge, that one had almost as many coincidences and twists as my old fantasy novels. Elizabeth-Jane—first she was the mayor’s daughter, then the sailor’s, then the mayor’s again. Or was she, finally, crushingly, the sailor’s?

  I read in a state near compulsion, my tired brain skittering on to each new page. I shivered with anticipation, tingled with dread. When all the calamities crashed down at once, I wept. I knew Wessex was made up. Yet it felt more real than anything outside the cocoon of my bed. Arcadia, Indiana, was a distant murmur, one dim streetlight bleeding through the curtains. Only when I heard my mother’s own quiet sobs was the spell broken. I tightened my cocoon, kept on reading.

  I remember one night in eighth grade, the depths of February—I’d come to the part where Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae, the clever young farmer, were falling in love. In Casterbridge, they never seemed to have occasion to talk, shy of each other and the eyes of the other villagers. But Elizabeth-Jane’s mother arranged to have the two, unawares, meet at the granary of a nearby farm. When they realized they’d been tricked, they were awkward and overly polite, and Elizabeth Jane somehow managed to get herself covered in wheat husks. As they were about to say nervous good-byes, Farfrae said it wouldn’t do—it was raining, and wet chaff would ruin her clothes. Blowing was best, he said. And Elizabeth-Jane trembled as, carefully, one piece at a time, he blew the husks from her bonnet, her dress, “O,” she said, “thank you,” her hair, her neck, her—

  The book dropped from my hands. Nested under my heavy blankets, I felt it: my skull buzzing, icy, electric, like I’d touched my tongue to a battery or bonked my funny bone, though it seemed to come not from outside but within me. I shook my head to clear it, reached for my book. I couldn’t get hold of it. It kept slipping from my fingers.

  What did I think it was, way back then? Maybe exhaustion, all the sleep I missed. Or growing pains, my arms and legs still throbbing and twitching at night—maybe that prickling electricity had migrated to my head. My body seemed so foreign, so unwieldy, this all seemed more or less plausible.

  But I wasn’t convinced. That night wasn’t the first time I’d felt it. In school, someone slammed a locker or popped a blown-up lunch sack in the cafeteria—I startled, the buzzing came. Faintly, ghostly, but it was there, and stayed just long enough for me to miss a step or drop my fork into my spaghetti. Then it was gone.

  Now, lying in bed, I didn’t know whether to worry or treasure an inner secret. The girl detectives who always acted on a hunch, the dragon-riders in humming vibration with the very skies, Hardy’s tempestuous, willful, yearning women—maybe I was like them, more sensitive, more attuned than the rest of the plodding world. Call it hormones. Call it fear, an overheated imagination, a longing to be somewhere, anywhere else. Call it simple teenage delusion. Still, I felt, then, so weirdly, fiercely alive.

  Yet somehow, for ten then twenty seconds, as both Elizabeth-Jane and I trembled on the verge of either ecstasy or disaster, I just couldn’t pick up the book.

  I couldn’t move at all.

  TWO

  WAKE, 5:40. BLEATING ALARM, WOOLLY HEAD. FOG-GRAY light through the windows, fog outside and in. Creak down from bed, espresso almost in my sleep. Shower hot as I can stand. Empty, weary calm before the day yawns open. Oatmeal.

  Out the door, out on the street. Damp, chilly almost-rain. Whiff of the Pacific. Dodge the hypodermics, the human shit, Capp onto 17th onto Mission, the slumbering human zoo. A lump under heaped-up blankets. A beard and half a broken-veined face nestled in a filthy sleeping bag. Someone under a blue tarp, facedown, trembling. Don’t linger—white smoke drifting, cattails bobbing in the breeze—slip briskly by.

  BART to Millbrae to Caltrain, the 7:04. Get a seat upstairs. Earbuds in, white-noise app. Bury myself in apartment websites. Insulate. At Sunnyvale, the company shuttle, long circuit of MedEval’s campus. Last stop, my lab. In through the side door, three card swipes, past the bio-waste bins, into the break room, coffee. Don’t think about the bio-waste bins. Don’t.

  Lab quiet. Knock on the glass, wave to the night-shift techs as they finish up. Scattered yips from the pens. Earbuds back in. Bury myself in yesterday’s data, sift, compile, bug hunt. Steady, rhythmic thinking—sweet balm to the condition—until nine o’clock, when my day techs arrive, immediately start making their needs and grudges known.

  Seven, quitting time, hour in the company gym, climbing endless stairs. Skip the shower, stink up the train, maybe no one will stand next to me. Someone always does. White noise up. If I’m tired, touchy, then smoke, cattails, sun-bleached picnic tables, diamonds of light, light making diamonds on the river. Home. Reheat something, two glasses of Moscato. Repeats of The Grand Design, couples and families sledgehammering through cabinets, walls, old and awful habits. Lives torn down, rehabbed every twenty-two-and-a-half soothing minutes. Creature comforts, snack-size redemptions.

  A quarter drunk, my bath. Hot as I can stand. The knot between my shoulders unwinds. My vigilant, chattering mind goes blank, and for upwards of ten, fifteen minutes, it just cannot touch me.

  Then I climb up to the loft and sleep, and the river rises. The current pulls me along, pulls me down—shoves me back up. I’m awake and lie there limp, sweating, unmoving. Slowly, I sink back down. Giddy joy, almost smiling in my sleep, then jags of terror, then something amorphously sexual, hands fluttering over my body, caressing, smothering—everythi
ng I stifle during the day coming back to ravage me in dreams.

  Wake, 5:40. Bleating alarm, woolly head. Creak down from bed. Repeat.

  Same old grinding, deadening routine. But it got me through. I could, at least, guess what might be coming. I could prepare. On a good day, just a little flutter or slump in my private moments. I was, at least, surviving.

  And then, at the end of another endless week, I walked into the bar.

  THREE

  I WALKED RIGHT OUT.

  Even on a Friday night, the Pit Stop should’ve been dead. That’s why Brook and I met there. Instead, a crowd of twenty-somethings dressed for the weekend. My one go-to dive in the Mission had been “discovered.”

  It was January, a wet month in a dry year. I stood out in the rain, watched the streetlights streak and smear across the dark, gleaming streets. Brook was late. Two months since I’d seen her. Work, we both kept saying. I texted in one rush—Hey here where you at ETA?—thought about going home. But, no, I wouldn’t back out. What was worse, soaked misery or the crowd inside? I got rained on some more. I went inside.

  It was loud, the jukebox playing Bob Seger, everyone shouting above it. I grimaced my way to the bar. All elbows, body heat. A wash of self-consciousness as I inched out of my coat—I’d come straight from work, in pantsuit and flats. A group of friends were laughing at a joke, one guy doubled over like he’d been socked in the gut. The sudden wallop of his pleasure—cattails, willows, diamonds of light—I needed to insulate myself against him.

  An open stool at the bar, I got myself into it, grasped the rail. The bartender came over, poured me a glass of white, menthol between her fingers. ABSOLUTELY NO SMOKING sign above the bar, and everyone was. “Looks like your ship came in,” I said, gesturing at the crowd. “Hope they tip big.”

  She exhaled a burnt minty cloud. “And how long before the boss cans my ass for some young thing?”

  I murmured in commiseration, left my wine to sweat down its sides, my fingers slightly dead. Across the room, the pool table was free. The Pit Stop was too tight to really play. Still, I could rack one up, play myself, a couple of rhythmic, distracting games. But, no, safer over here. Too shitty, too unpredictable a week to take more risks.

  All that week the trains had run late. A drop of rain on the tracks, they ran late. Morning and evening, I’d stood eyes closed in the packed, rattling car, everyone’s irritation pulsing around me, amplifying my own. Secondhand pain, mirror neurons, automatic responses in the supramarginal gyrus, empathy—whatever you call it, I needed to be wary. I’d already had two bad attacks that week.

  The first had been uncomplicated: Tuesday, coming home late from work, a car whipped around the corner, blasted its horn at me. I crumpled to the curb, went down on my ass, hobbled home. Sudden, blunt surprise—it wears off quick. But the second attack . . .

  Early Thursday morning on Mission, I’d passed a torso in a wheelchair: stub legs, stub arms, paper begging cup in what he had for a lap, plastic rehab bracelet around his tiny wrist. “Hey, lovely lady, spare some . . .” He slurred off into a bleary smile. Jesus, to see him . . . I had to get down on a bus bench, sit awhile, my head bobbing. A cop came by—“Ma’am? Can’t sleep here!”—poked me in the leg with something, his nightstick maybe, then just moved on. I heard the torso roll past, the whir of his motorized chair. My eyes were still closed—willows, cattails—but I couldn’t unsee him. I had to sit on that bench another fifteen minutes. Even now, at the end of my week, glass of wine between my dead fingers, I had to labor not to add his pain to my own.

  “YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE to educate everyone,” Dr. Bell said when he diagnosed me. “Everyone.” So here’s the short version: I’m paralyzed by emotion.

  Mostly, ninety percent of the time, the big ones trigger the bad attacks. The big, primal stuff: rage, ecstasy, sorrow, disgust, laughter, horror, our friend surprise. All of them can land me on my ass. Or worse.

  The more subtle things, the shades between the bright, primary colors, they’re easier. Embarrassment, apprehension, melancholy, grudging admiration, conflicted trust . . . How many should I list? The delight soured by envy when Brook tells me about yet another amazing party? The lazy, luxurious serenity that washes in after a huge meal? The oddly poignant remorse and self-reproach I feel whenever I just miss a train? Our heads paint with every pigment on the wheel. Small mercy, then, that the smaller, in-between stuff tends not to trigger me. Or, when it does, only minor attacks.

  The severity, the duration, it all depends on how strong the emotion, how sudden, how tangled up with other emotions. “You’re a puppet dancing around on your strings,” Dr. Bell once told me. “Cut one string, what happens?” A sudden loss of muscle tone, partial paralysis. A minor attack is usually benign: My eyelids flutter, my jaw sags, my knees go a little weak. My fingers quit working; I keep dropping my pen or something. An annoyance, a few weird looks if anyone else is around to see.

  But bad attacks . . . “Now cut all the strings,” Dr. Bell said. Total collapse.

  And what causes all of this? I was sixteen when Mom and I found Dr. Bell. I had questions. I asked and asked. “So, when are you getting your neurophysiology PhD?” he’d answer with a pedant’s sigh. “All you need to know: The human brain is the universe’s most implausible chemistry experiment.”

  I SIPPED MY WINE carefully. The room kept pushing in: the group of friends busting up at another joke; a clutch of blond Marina girls hooting about something, all loud and elated; a guy waving a twenty to get the bartender’s attention, way too surly about being ignored. Cattails, willows, sunbleached picnic tables, white smoke. I’d spent all week looking forward to catching up with Brook. My goal for the week now: just stay vertical.

  Skunky beer, pool-cue chalk dust, the bartender’s menthols—the dank familiarity of the Pit Stop calmed me a little. And the taste of the wine, cheery, sweet stuff that reminded me of grad school, when I could, briefly, drink myself into equilibrium. I signaled for another.

  As I did, a guy nestled up to the bar. He immediately pulled back to check the sleeves of his chambray shirt for stains. Dark Japanese denim, sweetly scented Moroccan-oiled hair—he was attractive, yes, and the clothes beautiful. He ordered three Anchor Steams, three shots of Fernet, glanced over, smiled at me, shook his head.

  “I can hardly believe it.”

  “Sorry?” I said.

  “There are still places like this in the hood.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I’d say it’s totally unpretentious, but that sounds really pretentious.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Okay, wait, dumb question, but who are you with?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “If it’s a start-up, no way I’ll be able to guess. There’s a new start-up every half-second. But you seem way more recruitable than that.”

  A compliment, sort of, that he’d intuited I was an engineer, in my past life anyway. And he was trying to push past my one-word answers. All of this could’ve been, I don’t know, fun?

  “Sorry,” I said, “but you really don’t want to know what I do.”

  “We do what we have to do.” He shrugged philosophically, narrowed his eyes, and said in a mock-sultry murmur, “So, another drink here? Or should we just skip right to mimosas tomorrow morning?”

  Oh, thank God there was no reason to talk to this guy now. He was trying for ironic and hadn’t quite sold it. Well-oiled as he was, there was something melancholy about him. All of these young guys—and, yes, girls, too—who could buy and maybe even do whatever they wanted yet still couldn’t fulfill all the things San Francisco and its heavy legacy of liberation promised—even on the train, I felt all their desperate energy. Lord knows a little irony gets us all through. Still, I just . . .

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Please, I just can’t.”

  He smirked again. “Can’t what?”

  I needed the fastest way out. “That line,” I beg
an, “that’s not even the slimiest thing you just said. You asked where I work but just so I’d ask you. So, you want me to guess what you make? Three hundred grand a year? Five hundred? Why don’t you write it on the back of your card, and I’ll . . .” I ran out of steam. “Please,” I mumbled, “go back to your bro-grammer buddies looking on over there. Truly, don’t waste your time.”

  He laughed uncertainly, muttered a perfunctory “bitch” at me, and retreated to his friends. I felt so shitty I drooped in my stool, and probably looked like a lunatic in front of all of them.

  When I came back, I looked up and saw Brook threading through the crowd. The girl I met the first day of fifth grade, the one in dungarees and snap bracelets, was now the twenty-nine-year-old in ankle boots, sheer black tights, and, somehow, leather lace-up shorts and a camouflage jacket. She wore one half of her dark hair long, the other half shaved, a look every other edgy girl in the city seemed to be trying but Brook actually pulled off. Her inhibitions sat in the junk drawer of the past, somewhere back there with the midwestern deference and the novelty bracelets.

  “Hey, lady.” She gave me a light hug, brushed her lips against my cheek. “Shit, sorry I’m late. Had a last-minute event to get off the ground.” She signaled the bartender, who started mixing Brook her usual Manhattan, ignoring at least five people waiting for drinks. “Jesus,” Brook said, glancing around, “what happened to the good old Armpit?” She looked at me with concern. “You okay? We could go to your place?”

  “Don’t worry, it’s just . . . We can’t give up our shithole without a fight.”

  Nothing drooping now, but Brook didn’t need any obvious signals. She reached out, brushed a snarl out of my hair. I flinched, then thought of middle school sleepovers, giggling in the bathroom as we streaked each other’s hair purple with Manic Panic.