What He's Poised to Do

father at work, and she remembered continuing to tell them that even after the good father declared that he was stepping down from the position. When her husband wasn’t playing with his son, she remembered, he was usually complaining: about how life hadn’t taken him far enough, about the shoddy work of others in his field. Once he wondered out loud if he would still be married in two years. Then, finally, engorged with his own doubt, he had retreated to a hotel in another city and announced that he was reconsidering the marriage. She was serious with him on the telephone, but as soon as she hung up she found herself laughing. She knew he had already decided as much as he was capable of deciding. Still, when the postcard came, she trembled, and when she finally worked up the courage to read it, she held it at arm’s length as if to protect herself from the poison of the thing. After a few days, she told her son that his father was not coming home, at least not right away. She misrepresented his absence as a kind of vacation. When her husband did show up, it was only for a week, after which he moved out. He did several terrible things to her, mostly sins of omission, though his dedication as a father never waned, which filled her with a mix of gratitude and killing rage. She flips through the mail more rapidly. Bill, bill, bill. No letter from her son. Catalog, bill, magazine. Had the postal service slowed down? Magazine, political advertisement, bill. The letter has to be there, but it isn’t. Her hand pushes away the mail; she goes to the couch, lies down, switches off the small red lamp on the side table, and forgets. She gets up, makes herself a snack, and goes back to the mail with renewed resolve. She shakes out every magazine in search of the letter and finds nothing. Finally it falls out of a lingerie catalog. But it isn’t a letter. It’s a postcard. She kneels, trembling, and inspects it. The handwriting is like her husband’s, but it’s her son’s. It has to be, and so it is. She picks up the postcard and reads it. Her son is writing about a new friend he has found, and how thrilled he is to be at camp, and how he wants to visit the friend over the winter, and how he is sorry that he acted so churlishly the first few weeks of camp. Churlishly? she thinks. She stares at the back of the postcard and tries to visualize her son writing the word. Then her hand sets the postcard down on the flat white surface of the kitchen table, locates a letter-opener, and starts to slit the bills open, one by one.

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About the author Meet Ben Greenman

WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, I had a habit of walking out of parties minutes after walking into them. The reason was simple: I didn’t like the sadness. I’d come into the room, and it was like I was walking into a sliding glass door of shame, embarrassment, and self-hatred—and not just my own. I’m not saying people didn’t have fun at parties. People had fun. But the fun was created, to some degree, by the sadness. It was the negative space carved out of the unfun. I didn’t like it, and when it started creeping up my spine, I left. Later on I learned some strategies for blocking out the sadness I was absorbing from the room, most of which involved poor eye contact and a steady stream of jokes. We do what we can with the tools we have.

“It was like I was walking into a sliding glass door of shame, embarrassment, and self-hatred—and not just my own.”

After college, I followed the vertices of a triangle: I went back to Miami, where I had grown up, to work as a newspaper reporter; went back to Chicago, where I was born, to attend graduate school; then went to New York, where I became a magazine editor and started to publish books of fiction. Recently, while I was on tour for my last book, Please Step Back, I found myself once again in O’Hare Airport in Chicago, where I sat and watched the people pass by, their brows furrowed with one worry or another: maybe the mortgage was late or the insurance on the second car was too expensive or the husband was putting on weight in a way that seemed to indicate depression or the stepson was developing violent tendencies or the boss wasn’t showing enough respect or the lover wasn’t loving back the way she used to or the mother needed surgery. I had forgotten what I had known in college, but now I remembered it suddenly. Every expression, every gesture, seemed to broadcast sadness. I put my earphones in to block it all out and went to get something to eat.