The Portable Veblen: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016. Elizabeth McKenzie
together. We are two wild and crazy girls. We love to wear our big heavy clogs and act crazy in the moonlight.”
“Stop it!” Veblen cried out.
“I’m kidding,” Paul said. “How could I say anything after exposing you to Hans?”
Which led Veblen to realize these friendships were based on a phenotype exchange that occurred only with childhood friends, in which they were simply part of you forever, for better or worse. Veblen had been assigned to the tall, gawky new girl in sixth grade as her Welcome Buddy. In the first few days of their mandated buddy-hood, a boy on the playground was stung by a bee and his foot swelled up like a gangplank. Veblen made an observation about elephantiasis, to which Albertine said, “What’s that?”
“Haven’t you heard of elephantiasis?”
“Why would I? I can’t read your mind.”
“Well, it’s a horrible disease from parasites that makes your body parts look thick and stumpy, like elephant legs,” Veblen pronounced.
“Ha ha ha.”
“It’s not funny, it’s very painful.”
“You’re trying to humiliate me so you can have the power.”
Veblen was intrigued by the girl’s reasoning, as comfortably skewed as her mother’s. “What do you mean?”
“You’re testing to see if I can be manipulated,” Albertine declared, pushing her wire frames up her nose.
“I swear, there’s such a thing,” young Veblen declared, all at once appreciating how elephantiasis could sound as made up as tigerrhea or hippopotomania. They went to the school library and found the disease in the encyclopedia; the new girl shrugged her broom of blond hair and walked off. Veblen refused to believe in the girl’s indifference.
The next day she brought one of her mother’s medical journals to school, an issue chronicling a recent outbreak of elephantiasis in Indonesia. As Veblen calculated, the new girl seemed touched by Veblen’s passion to lift her up on the subject of tropical illness. Not only that, but they discovered their shared inclination to laugh in the face of bizarre and horrible realities they were spared by a twentieth-century California childhood, and they’d been best friends ever since. Almost eighteen years!
STILL, broad-spectrum uneasiness led to a long lunchtime conversation outside the hospital with Albertine only yesterday.
“Why didn’t you like him?” Veblen wanted to know.
“So you’re having doubts.”
“No, but even if I were, it’s normal, right?”
Albertine, who specialized in doubts, who pointed out the shadow side of human nature at every turn, who swore allegiance to ambivalence and ambiguity, whose favorite color was gray, sounded concerned. “What kind of doubts?”
“No, you’re supposed to say ‘Of course! Everyone feels that way!’”
“I don’t have enough information. Maybe you should listen to your doubts this time.”
“Listen to my doubts?”
Albertine described a vitamin salesman from San Bruno she’d doubted a few times before finding out he was a meth freak. Another recent doubt was over a gambling landscaper from Marin. Veblen sensed a note of triumph in Albertine when she described her apperception of the man’s flaws.
“Is it possible you wouldn’t like anybody I liked, just because?”
“I could see the possibilities. He’s really nice looking, and he’s not as alpha as he wants you to think.”
Veblen tried to explain her mild feeling of doom, how it was like there was some kind of terrible alchemy under way, how it was like she was rushing toward a disaster, and how it didn’t make sense because she was also excited and happy.
“Just be sure it’s not a growing awareness that Paul’s all wrong for you and will ruin your life,” Albertine said, and then asked: “Have you read Marriage: Dead or Alive?”
Veblen said no.
“It’s the magnum opus of Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig. He says marriage is a continuous inevitable confrontation that can be resolved only through death.”
“How great! Does it have to be that way?” pleaded Veblen, feeling worse than ever. “I’ve already had a continuous confrontation that can be resolved only through death, with my mother.”
“Exactly. All the more reason you’re projecting impossible romantic fantasies onto Paul.”
“Who the heck is Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig?” Veblen snarled.
As her friend told her more about the brilliant Jungian and the ponderous message of Marriage: Dead or Alive (“That a decent, responsible society not only allows, but actually encourages, young people in their complete ignorance to bind themselves permanently to the psychological problems which their vows entail, seems incomprehensible. The more life expectancy increases, the more grotesque this situation become …”), Veblen began to see how ill-equipped she was to hack out a life with someone. Anyone! She’d end up bossing him around like her mother or grinding up his stuff in a wood chipper like her grandmother. Not for her. No way!
She’d been with Paul for about four months, without much of a misunderstanding. Her unvoiced needs were in remission, and Paul was impressively constant. Sure, there had been minor disagreements, moments pinched by disappointment over how to treat squirrels or value material possessions, but overall, she felt that Paul fit her romantic ideal as a man and avatar in the world. She found new things to love about him all the time: the way he always, always dropped his wallet when he pulled it from his pocket; the way he made fires in her tiny fireplace, blowing on scraps of wood and pinecones he gathered on walks; the warm smell of his head; the way he was generous and he’d bring beer or wine or cookies to her house whenever he came; how he’d help her with any chore that needed doing; the way he read the paper every morning, completely absorbed; the way he pored through military histories, biographies of generals, and epics about the sea—hearty, manly tales of bravery and adventure. He agreed it was good to avoid grocery carts with wadded tissues in them. He loved tacos as much as she did. If she sneezed, he’d laugh and say she sneezed like a cat. He took her to classical music concerts and knew all about the composers and the works. When she said she couldn’t go out to a movie or a concert because she had to meet a deadline for the Diaspora Project, he didn’t make a word of complaint.
Look at how tiny their troubles were! One recent evening the winds came barreling through the Golden Gate, down the peninsula from the north, unusually frigid and fierce, tearing flowers from their stems, clearing dead wood from the treetops, and then it hailed. Ice pellets scarred fresh young leaves and made drifts under the rain gutters, and children ran outside to gather them, and screamed in surprise when they discovered how they froze their hands. It was a night for comfort food, and Veblen prepared turkey meatballs for dinner, well seasoned with rosemary and sage, under a tangy homemade ragù, along with artichoke risotto and a salad, but when she mentioned she’d used turkey he blanched, as if she’d revealed she’d made them with grasshoppers or grubs. During the meal, he appeared to devour what was on his plate so fast he had to go to the kitchen several times to get more.
“Mmm, delicious,” he kept saying. “Turkey balls rule.”
“Not bad,” Veblen said.
“But let’s not have them too often, though, or else they’ll lose their impact.”
“Okay,” said Veblen.
Later that evening, as she was cleaning up, she opened the trash container, and sitting on top, almost in rows as if arranged for viewing, were the turkey balls Paul pretended to have consumed. She started to laugh and asked why he didn’t say something. “Alternately, you could have hidden them better, and I never would have known.”
He