The Portable Veblen: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016. Elizabeth McKenzie
have any sense of wanting my input?” And such an ironic question it was, for there had already been so much input, so much.
“Of course. That’s the point.” She held the phone tenderly, as if it were an actual part of her mother.
“I feel excluded from the most important decision of your life.”
“No, Mom, I’m calling you first thing because you’re the most important person to me.”
There followed a silence, for her mother tended to freeze up and ignore compliments and love, and court instead all the miffs and tiffs she could gather round, in a perpetual powwow of pity.
“Well. Did you say yes for all the right reasons?”
The coffeemaker gurgled and hissed, a tired old friend doing its best. “I think so.”
“Marriage is not the point of a woman’s life. Do you understand that?”
“By now.”
“Do you love him?”
“I do, actually.”
“Is everything between you, good, sexually?”
“Mom, please! Boundaries or whatever.”
“Don’t say boundaries like every teenage twerp on TV.”
It bothered Veblen’s mother that most people were lazy and had given up original thought a long time ago, stealing stale phrases from the media like magpies. Fair enough. The problem was that her mother always overstated her points, ruining her credibility. Veblen had learned to seek out supporting evidence to give her mother’s unique worldview some muscle, and in this case she’d found it in the writings of the wonderful William James: “We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.”
“Okay, Mom. That’s private. Better?”
“Yes. It’s very important, and it’s also important to avoid hackneyed phrases, especially snide ones, which sound very déclassé.”
Veblen pressed on. “We have things in common with his family and they seem really nice.”
“A nice family counts for a lot, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. What do you tell him about me?”
She could hear her mother scratch her scalp, raking dead skin under her nails. “Good stuff. You’re hard to sum up. That’s why we have to meet.”
“I don’t know, Veblen. Nobody likes me when they meet me.”
Veblen replied faithfully, “No, not true.”
“Historically it’s quite true. Especially doctors. Doctors abhor me because I don’t kowtow to them.”
“He won’t be your doctor, he’ll be your son-in-law.”
“I’ve never met a doctor who didn’t wear the mantle of the doctor everywhere.”
Veblen shook her head. “But he’s in research, it’s different.”
From bracing them in defense since girlhood, her guts were robust, her tolerance for adversity high. By clearly emphasizing all that was lacking in others, by mapping and raising to an art form the catalog of their flaws, Veblen’s mother had inversely punched out a template for an ideal human being, and it was the unspoken assumption that Veblen would aspire to this template with all her might.
“It’s very interesting that you’ve chosen to marry a physician,” her mother noted, with the overly crisp diction she employed when feeling cornered.
“There are a lot of physicians in the world,” Veblen said.
“We’re not paying for a big wedding. It’s a complete waste.”
“Of course I know that.”
“He’ll expect one if he’s a doctor. They’re ambitious and full of themselves!”
“There’s only one answer to this—to come visit right away,” Veblen pressed.
“He’ll have a field day, spinning all kinds of theories about me.”
“This is happy news, Mom! Would you please cool it?”
“What does Albertine think of all this? I suppose you’ve told Albertine all about it?”
“No, I haven’t told anybody, I already said that.”
In the background she could hear Linus consoling.
“Linus is asking me to calm down,” Melanie said. “He wants to check my blood pressure. Who will you invite?”
“To the wedding? We haven’t thought about it yet!”
“We have no friends, which is humiliating.”
Why was it suddenly humiliating, after years of hiding away from everybody? Veblen watched a single hawk circling just below the clouds.
Linus’s voice came on the line. “Your mother’s face is flushed and her heart is racing.”
“A little excitement won’t hurt.”
“I need both hands now, I’m going to say good-bye. You’ll come see us soon?”
“We’ll come soon,” said Veblen.
SHE WASHED DOWN tabs of Vivactil and citalopram. The coffee was piping hot. She twisted a clump of her hair. What was that list again? Muckrakers, carousers, the sweet-toothed, the lion-hearted?
Sometimes when Veblen had a deadline for a translation she couldn’t tell anyone she had a deadline because it was work she wasn’t paid for, and furthermore, it wasn’t a real deadline, it was a self-imposed deadline. What kind of deadline was that? Could Paul appreciate her deadlines? It would mean a lot to her if he could.
Paul didn’t know she took antidepressants, but she also didn’t talk about what toothpaste or deodorant she used (Colgate and Tom’s).
And he didn’t realize she hadn’t graduated from college either. That embarrassed her, and was probably something he should find out soon. It simply hadn’t come up. Since when you marry you are offering yourself as a commodity, maybe it was time to clear up details of her product description. Healthy thirty-year-old woman with no college degree. Caveat emptor.
In spite of her cheerfulness in the presence of others, one could see this woman had gone through something that had left its mark. Sometimes her reactions seemed to happen in slow motion, like old, calloused manatees moving through murky water. At least, that’s how she’d once tried to explain it to the psychiatrist who dispensed her medications. Sometimes she wondered if she had some kind of processing disorder. Or maybe it was just a defense mechanism. One could see she was bruised by all the dodging that comes of the furtive meeting of one’s needs.
FOR SEVERAL YEARS before meeting Paul, Veblen had steered clear of romantic entanglements, haunted by runaway emotions and a few sad breakups in the past. “No one will ever understand me!” she often cried when feeling sorry for herself. Sometimes it was all she could do not to bite her arm until her jaw ached, and take note of how long the teeth marks showed. She had made false assumptions in those early experiences, such as that love meant becoming inseparable, and a few suitors came and went, none of them ready for all-out fusion. She began to realize she hadn’t been looking for a love affair, but rather a human safe house from her mother. A legitimate excuse to be busy with someone else. An all-loving being who would ever after uphold her as did the earth beneath her feet.
She came to recognize her weaknesses through these trial-and-error relationships, and lament that she had them. In a tug-of-war of want and postponement she continued with her deeply romantic beliefs, living in a state of wistful anticipation for life to become as wonderful as she was sure, someday, it would.
Veblen’s