The Portable Veblen: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016. Elizabeth McKenzie
that it happened fast, and that she’ll have to meet you, immediately if not sooner.”
“Should we call and tell them?”
“Tomorrow.”
She had an internal clock set to her mother’s hunger for news, but sometimes it felt good to ignore it.
“What about your father?” Paul asked.
“Hmm. He’ll just say we’ll never be the same.”
“We’re old enough not to care what our parents think, but somehow we do,” Paul admitted, philosophically.
“That’s for sure.”
“Because they allowed us to exist.”
She had once concluded everyone on earth was a servant to the previous generation—born from the body’s factory for entertainment and use. A life could be spent like an apology—to prove you had been worth it.
Pressed against him, aware of the conspicuous new ring on her hand catching on the sheets, she jolted when he uttered in his day voice: “Veb, those noises don’t bother you?”
Not wanting to be mistaken for a person who resides obliviously in a pesthole, she explained, “I have this strange thing. If someone around me is bothered by something, I feel like I’m not allowed to be bothered.”
“Not allowed?”
“It’s like I’m under pressure from some higher source to remain calm or neutral, to prevent something terrible from happening.”
“That’s kinda twisted. Do you spend a lot of time doing that?”
She reflected that leveraging herself had become a major pastime. Was it fear of the domino, snowball, or butterfly effect? Or maybe just a vague awareness of behavioral cusps, cascading failures, chain reactions, and quantum chaos?
“It’s instinctive, so I don’t even notice.”
“So we’ll never be able to share a grievance?”
“Oh! I’ll work on it, if sharing grievances means a lot to you.”
He sniffed. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to dislike the sound of gnawing rodents near our bed.”
“True.” She laughed, and kissed his head.
IN THE NIGHT she reflected that the squirrel was not gnawing—in fact, maybe it was orchestrating a master plan.
And Paul, she would discover, had many reasons to object to any kind of wild rumpus heard through walls, but had yet to understand the connection.
And she herself could withstand more than her share of trespasses by willful beings.
These embedded differences were enough to wreck everything, but what eager young couple would ever believe it?
IN THE MORNING, moments after Paul went out to buy pastries, a fluffy Sciurus griseus appeared on her bedroom sill. Its topcoat was charcoal, its chest as white as an oxford shirt, its tail as rakish as the feather in a conquistador’s cap. The western gray sat with quiet dignity, head high, shoulders back, casting a forthright glance through the window with its large brown eyes. What a vision!
She sat up in bed and it seemed quite natural to speak to the animal through the windowpane, though it had been a long while since she had known any squirrels. “Well, then! You’re a very handsome squirrel. Very dignified.” To her amusement, the squirrel lowered its head slightly, as if it understood her and appreciated the compliment. “Are you living upstairs? You’re a noisy neighbor, and you kept Paul up all night long!” This time, the squirrel picked up its head and seemed to shrug. A coincidence, surely, but Veblen hiccuped with surprise. And then the squirrel reached out and placed one of its hands onto the glass, as if to touch the side of her face.
“Oh! You’re really telling me something!” She extended her hand, but the new ring seemed to interfere, flashing and cold on her finger. She pulled it off and set it on the nightstand. With her hand unadorned, she felt free to place the tips of her fingers on the glass where the squirrel’s hand was pressed. The squirrel studied her with warm brown eyes, as if to ask: How well do you know yourself, and all the choices you could make? As if to tell her, I was cut loose from a hellish marriage, and I want to meet muckrakers, carousers, the sweet-toothed, and the lion-hearted, and you don’t know it yet, but you are all of these.
“I—what?” Veblen said, mesmerized.
Then, with a flick of its tail, it dashed away.
She jumped out of bed and threw on her robe and hurried out the back to see where it went, spying nothing but the soft winter grass and the growing wands of the lilies, the wet brown bed of needles beneath the Aleppo pine, the weathered fence line filigreed by termites, the mossy stones by the garage, the lichened roof. She was proud of her humble cottage on Tasso Street.
Then she went back inside and grabbed her phone to spring the news on her mother. Nothing being fully real until such springing. And nothing with her mother ever simple and straightforward either, and that was the thrill of it. A perverse infantile thrill necessary to life.
Linus, her stepfather, answered. “Hello?”
“Oh, hi, Linus, morning! Can I talk to Mom?”
“She’s asleep, dear. I’d say try in another few hours.”
“Just wake her up!”
“Well, she had a hard night. Had a reaction to the dye on a new set of towels we brought home. She’s been flat out since yesterday afternoon.”
“That’s sad. But I need to talk to her,” Veblen said, grinding some coffee.
“I’m afraid to go in there, you know how she gets. I’ll open the door a crack and whisper.”
Veblen heard the phone moving through space, then her mother’s cramped voice issuing from her big, despotic head obviously at an angle on a bolster. She was never at her best in the morning.
“Veblen, is something wrong?”
“No, not at all.”
Out the window, young moths flitted from the tips of the juniper. A large black beetle gnawed the side of the organ pipe cactus, carving a dwelling of just the right size in the winter shade.
“What is it?” asked her mother.
“A squirrel just came to the window and looked in at me.”
“Why is that so exciting?”
“It held out its paw. It made direct contact with me.”
“I thought you were over that. Dear god. Do Linus and I need to come down and intervene?”
Melanie C. Duffy, Veblen’s mother, was avid at intervening, and had intervened with resolve in Veblen’s life at all points, and was especially prone to anxiety about Veblen’s physical and mental health and apt to intervene over that on a daily basis.
“Oh, forget it. Maybe it was trying to see my ring.”
“What ring? I’m trembling.”
Veblen blurted: “Paul asked me to marry him.”
Silence.
“Mom?”
“Why did you tell me about the squirrel first?”
She found herself in earnest search of an answer, before snapping out of her childhood habit of full accountability.
“Because you like to know everything.” She pulled her favorite mugs from the cupboard, wondering when Paul would get back.
“It’s very odd you told me about the squirrel first. I haven’t even met this man.”
“I know, that’s why I’m