Americana Stories – Prose

Let That Be Your Pill—Fiction by Stacey Resnikoff

The day after the insurrection, Gražina saw puffy red ovals between her heart line and life lines. Hand cream did nothing. She watched the news standing with palms upturned.

Men with parenthetical facial hair around their mouths yelled this is our house. It could’ve been Mark on TV. Yet Mark was home yesterday, videoconferencing with clients. Duncan, almost eleven, was too young for an overthrow or facial hair.

A radicalized mob broke the peace, but not the transfer of power. Now the security failure of January 6th is being juxtaposed with the show of force in D.C. for the President’s June 1st photo opp. We’ll hear from community leaders.

“Of course we will,” Mark said, startling her. “Cue the Left whining.”

“Somebody needs to save democracy!” Lainey yelled from the kitchen.

“Mark, look,” Gražina said and showed him her palms. He squinted.

“Žina, maybe stop watching all this and take a shower,” he said and retreated.

Life had reached a cinematic level of woe. Gražina’s class was on hiatus for the pandemic, but her triggered students in extended remote learning still emailed her by the dozens. So much death, and now sedition.

“Goddamn it,” she said to no one.

“Mom just swore!” Duncan said.

“‘Goddamn’ is blasphemy, not a swear,” Lainey corrected him full-throated—a seventeen-year-old cheerleader on remote learning with nothing to cheer for. “And religious zealots are destroying this country.”

“Stop,” Mark said, further off.

<>

Gražina had taken to parking at Walden Pond to watch experimental films. Once a promising filmmaker from Tallinn, she was now a furloughed instructor of digital editing at a local charter school. Days earlier, here in the car at Walden, she’d watched an award-winning short—German Expressionistic, lots of shadow and shake—about a woman whose palms turned porous like a kitchen sponge. Feminist theorists said the film satirized gender roles. But Gražina had seen a soul made such a lodestone for others’ pain that she was literally turning to sponge. She wondered if watching that film had caused the ovals on her palms. She remembered in university, after seeing Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, she’d contracted pink eye. More than once she’d been told to stop living in a dreamworld.

Thwap. A woman with brown hair tucked a handbill under her wiper, REMOVE 45 FROM OFFICE: 25^TH AMENDMENT NOW, and walked toward the woods. Gražina pulled on her parka and followed.

Snow frosted the trail like meringue, but the pond looked bleak and gray. There were too many signs: Stay On Trail One Way, Wear Your Mask, Keep Out of Fenced-Off Areas, No Running, No Dogs. The tight fencing on Pond Path reminded Gražina of barbed wire, and she felt like a ball being rolled through a Rube Goldberg machine. As she got closer to the woman, she heard her own name.

“Gražina!”

She turned to see her maskless mother-in-law, Faith, and a friend.

“Mark thought you’d be here! We’re out for a walk to keep me busy while Mitch is away on business.” Faith had previously mentioned some trip—more than a little fishy during Covid—and Gražina wondered if her father-in-law was in D.C. “We were just saying how we miss flowers!”

“Your mother-in-law’s roses are to die for,” the friend said. She was from Gardening Club or Thoreau Circle, or both.

“It’s nice here in the winter. Much nicer than summer—too crowded,” Faith said. “Mitch blames the Commonwealth.”

“I thought he blamed immigration,” Gražina said. She tried to keep socially distant, but Faith moved closer.

“Well, the Commonwealth runs Walden Pond State Reservation, and it’s first-come, first-served. Anyone can come here. Really anyone.”

Gražina knew if she weren’t married to Mark, she’d be anyone, too. She looked ahead, but couldn’t see the woman. “I’d better get home.”

“No walk?”

“It’s long one-way. No turnarounds because of Covid. And it’s almost dinner.”

“Well, kiss my son and grandkids for me. If you’d only let Duncan and Lainey come to my house. Really, Gražina, I’m much more worried about this stolen election than some flu.”

<>

“Why’d you take the truck?” Mark asked that evening, scratching at beard stubble.

“I thought Lainey might want to go for a drive in the other car. There’s nothing for her to do here.” She knew Lainey was embarrassed to drive the red Denali pickup with its Keep America Great decal, not that Mark was eager to let her.

“I don’t want that rash all over my steering wheel.”

“It’s not catching. It’s autoimmune. I have a prescription.”

“The truck’s mine. The 4Runner’s for you and the kids. Did you see my mom?”

“Couldn’t miss her.” She carried a casserole from the oven to the table with hot mitts.

“Phones away,” Mark told Duncan and Lainey.

“I’ve got a school project about the lead-up to the insurrection,” Lainey said. “But they took down all Trump’s tweets, so it’s hard to research.”

“Very funny,” Mark said.

“Was I being funny?” Lainey darkened her phone screen.

“Politics don’t belong in school unless it’s the Pledge of Allegiance,” Mark said as they started eating. “Duncan’s principal showed them a movie today about gun control.”

“It was about school shootings,” Duncan said, his lips already ringed in red sauce. “I wrote in the chat, ‘Try to take people’s guns, they’ll give you their bullets.’”

Mark laughed.

“Not funny,” Lainey said.

“Duncan, what’s wrong with you? You could get expelled!”

“From online school?” Mark said, still laughing.

“They take gun talk very seriously in schools,” Gražina said. “Where did you learn that?”

“Dad and Grampy have bumper stickers.”

“No, they don’t.”

“My dad got us one,” Mark told her. He forked some pasta.

“Why? We don’t have guns.”

“I’m thinking about it,” Mark said. “You know, before they dump the second amendment.”

Gražina dropped her fork. “I won’t have that. I won’t.”

“Don’t overreact.”

She grabbed the pharmacy bag with her prescription, moved quickly to the bedroom, and shut the door. On her bed, she opened the tube and looked at her palms. The red ovals were spreading, meeting in the center like a flower. She rubbed in the steroid cream and lay back on her pillow.

“I don’t want a gun in the house,” she could hear Lainey saying in the kitchen. “And if you add that bumper sticker to the Trump truck, I’ll have to slash its tires.”

“That’s enough,” Mark said. “Eat.”

<>

The next afternoon was Saturday, so Gražina took the 4Runner to Walden Pond with a copy of Day-By-Day With Thoreau. The book had been a gift from her mother-in-law, and as she flipped through it in the car, she couldn’t understand how Faith could think herself in accord with Henry David Thoreau:

From the right point of view, every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow.

See the sun rise or set if possible each day. Let that be your pill.

Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

God himself culminates in the present moments.

Perhaps it was a lack of intellectual humility that made Faith and Mitch think they were more right than their neighbors, so full of God and rainbows. Gražina never challenged them. She grew up in a household with older Estonian parents who feared independence as much as occupation, who feared everything except keeping quiet.

Glancing up, she saw the same brown-haired woman from the previous day walk toward the woods. She pulled on her parka and called: “Hey! Can we talk?”

The woman’s eyes were dark and possibly contemptuous. It was hard to judge the expression of a person in a mask. Like Gražina, her billowing hair was pulled, not neatly, into a large clip. They could’ve been sisters. As she approached, the woman held out her hand to keep her at a distance. “What do you want?”

“You left a flyer on my windshield yesterday.”

“Yeah?”

They stood by a spate of signs: Trail Closures Ahead, Feeding Birds Can Be Harmful to Them and Create Aggressive Bird Behavior, NO Pets/Inflatables/Fires.

“I mean, why bother? Why here?”

The woman sized Gražina up in a way that made her feel like she was being chosen for a club. “If you let a single ray of light through the shutter, it will go on diffusing itself without limit till it enlighten the world. Thoreau.”

She felt sick all of a sudden, and the center of her palms ached. She pulled off her gloves and looked at them, the oval flowers red as a wound.

The woman was gone.

<>

After pulling in the two-car garage at home, she noticed she had eight new messages. Six were from students asking about the insurrection videos on the internet and TV: Were they real or fake? What if the Left created a hoax? How did the officer die? What happened to the one crushed in the doorway? Why did people make videos if what they were doing was illegal? Did anyone go to jail? And now a text from Lainey: Dad says Grampy is being questioned by police.

She rushed inside and saw Mark and Duncan horsing around in front of the TV. Duncan was laughing as his father tickled him.

“Are you gonna talk? Are you gonna talk?”

“No…I won’t tell you…where I’m from,” Duncan said.

“They’re playing Border Patrol,” Lainey said, deadpan.

Gražina tried to read Mark. “What’s happening with Mitch?”

“Nah, nothing,” he said. “My mom said he wasn’t there.”

“He wasn’t there.”

“D.C., yes. But not the Capitol Building.”

“How do you know?”

“He said so.”

Duncan was trying to get his father to keep playing. “Let me into the country!”

“She’s pretty hyped up though. Now that you’re home, I should go see her.” He kneeled, wiping his hands on his jeans.

“Ooo,” Lainey said. “She should bury Grampy’s ‘Biden Stole It’ sign. Could be evidence.”

“Stop it,” Mark said to Lainey, then took Duncan’s hands off his neck. “You, too.”

Gražina reached for her son, and he retreated to her arms. He didn’t do that much anymore. “Mark, can you take the 4Runner? It’s making a sound.”

“What?”

“Like a clunking. A metal-on-metal sound. Intermittent.” She stroked Duncan’s hair momentarily, but he broke free and splayed himself on the floor, legs in the air.

“Front or back? Over bumps or when?”

“I can’t tell. Sounds like the old blender.”

Mark shook his head. “Yeah, I’ll drive it. Might be the sway bar.”

“Can I come?” Duncan said.

“Nah, Gramma’s too pissed off. I’ll be back for dinner.”

“Tell Faith—Tell her we’re—” She couldn’t find the words. “I mean, we’re sorry Mitch got caught up in—”

Mark looked burdened. “I’ll just let her complain. That’s what she wants. How are your hands?”

She held them up, and he winced. “You’re sure it’s not catching.”

“It’s not catching. Tell her we hope Mitch is home soon.”

“Yeah, sure. Can’t wait.”

After hearing the 4Runner leave, Gražina turned off the TV and whispered to Duncan. “Hey, how about a ride?”

“In what?” Duncan’s back was flat on the floor, his feet on the chair now, banging it with his heels.

“The truck, silly.”

“Dad drives the truck. He said so.”

“I wouldn’t be seen in it,” Lainey said. She left the room, gazing at her phone.

“C’mon, Duncan. Want to go in the truck without Dad? You and me?”

“You’re not allowed.”

“That’s not true.”

“Dad says.” He was challenging her.

“You know what, Duncan? Dad is wrong a lot.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh yeah? You know…he’s not so tough on the inside. Grampy made him cry.”

He stopped banging his feet. “Dad doesn’t cry.”

“When Dad was sixteen, Grampy took away the keys to a car that Dad built with his own hands. And he told me he cried in his room for a week.”

“Dad did? Did Grampy give him back the keys?”

“It took three weeks. And when Grampy finally returned the keys, Dad wouldn’t drive it.”

“The car he built.”

“Yep. He sold it. He wanted to show Grampy he didn’t care about it anymore. But I know he did.”

“That’s sad.”

“Yeah, that’s sad.”

Duncan concentrated hard on the ceiling like he was looking for a way up and out. “I’m gonna go play Fortnite.”

“OK, you go ahead. I’ll go for a drive myself.”

“OK.”

“Duncan?”

“Yeah?”

“Dad is wrong about a lot of things.”

Duncan shrugged, his bottom lip out, then asked, “Was Grampy wrong? If he went inside the Capitol?”

“Yes. He was. All those people broke the law.”

“Dad said—” He stopped. “I wish it never happened.”

<>

The interior of the luxury pickup smelled of leather cleaner. Gražina surprised herself with thoughts of harm she could inflict, from scratching the paint with her keys to rolling it right into Walden Pond. Duncan needed to see things—needed to see Mark as fallible. She couldn’t put her finger on exactly when, but sometime in the last four years, her husband had become one of those men who thought blind spots and limitations of imagination were inalienable rights. The change scared her. Or she’d never looked closely enough.

She turned the ignition, thinking of the woman with the flyer. A single ray of light through the shutter. How could she have realized only now the need to protect her son as much from becoming dangerous as from danger?

Duncan appeared in the garage as the truck idled. He climbed in the back seat without a word, bundled in an oversized canvas jacket of Mark’s.

“Let’s see if we can still find any Christmas lights up,” she said, palms burning. Heat charged from the truck’s vents.

As she backed out, a car pulled into the driveway next to them. The 4Runner. Mark leaned toward the passenger side window. Gražina and Duncan opened their windows, too.

“I called my mom on the way, and she’s not home anymore,” Mark said.

It was snowing in fluffy pieces as the truck’s exhaust swirled. Snowflakes landed on Gražina’s left palm, and it felt like cooling lava.

“We’re going to look for Christmas lights,” she said, a little shaky.

“Don’t let the interior get wet,” Mark said, pointing. “Let’s switch.”

There was a sizzle from her palm to her wrist. “I’m taking the truck.”

“Take your car. It sounds fine.”

Gražina shook her head and pulled onto the dark street. When she glanced back at Mark, he was standing in the driveway in the illuminated exhaust, mouthing something starting with a W. Maybe Why the—? Or What the—?

She accelerated, flurries wetting her wet cheek.

“Mom.”

“Yes, sweetie?” She tried to keep her voice even.

“Dad’s mad about the truck.” In the rearview, she could see her son looking back as if his father might follow them. Yet there were no headlights. “Really mad.” He puckered his mouth in thought. “Do you think he’ll cry?”

Stunned, she shook her head no.

Duncan looked behind them a few more times before settling. Then, just like her sweet little boy at winter’s first snow, he stuck his tongue out into the darkness.

___________