The Know-It-All by Madison Durand

---

There’s a window I stare out of sometimes when I’m convinced John doesn’t love me anymore. It’s a tiny circular one in the kitchen that faces the icy Upper Delaware River, which winds and bends under a swarm of geese that never seem to know where they’re going.

Something in their sky dance, their elegance, reminds me of my mother. I often see her face forming over the low-hanging clouds in a billow of wings.

In the vaporous ecosystem of my memory, she’s leaning over a balcony, blowing cigarette smoke into a sea of veiny trees behind our childhood home. No one’s busier than the person who’s lost feelings for you, Marge. Not a soul.

I believe her, I really do. And you know what the problem is? I’ll tell you. John’s the busiest person I know.

He’s making a noose out of his necktie in the hallway mirror, then hopping into a pair of shoes and slapping the kitchen counter for balance. He must see me sitting there, melancholy as Judas. But he simply sighs and yawns and rummages around, waking up the same way all New York men do: as if the rain falls on his head harder than it does on any other head in America.

“I want to go to Carrie Ann’s tonight, if that’s alright with you,” I tell him. 

“Course it’s all right,” he says, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Give her my regards.” 

“I mean with you, John. I’d like you to be there.”

“Darling.” He kisses the crown of my head. “I’m swamped tonight, I really am.” Crumbs rain down from the toast in his hand onto my shirt. “But I love you to pieces. You know that, don’t you?”

A woman always knows.

She knows the second he starts making love with the same discontent he uses to salt his potatoes. The minute his children become another source of stress he can no longer shave from his sandpaper skin. The instant he starts painting his 1 am shadow across the bedroom walls, gingerly peeling away the sheets before soiling them with another woman’s perfume.

And the sun knows it, too, a true ally to womankind. That’s why it pokes a wavering hand through the bedroom’s silk curtains at the crack of dawn and glides a beaming fingernail up his face, passing a spotlight over the pearly mounds of disappearing sand in his pupil. The sun does all of this to warn a ceiling-gazing wife: Something’s different, baby. You’re disappearing, too.

It fissures up—that chestnut aura of kitchen dancing, soft romancing—until all that remains is Iwantbettterness. Ideserverbetterness. Iambetterness. And once it happens?

A woman always knows. 

“What are you looking for?” I ask him finally. He’s foraging through a cabinet under the stove, his ass in the air like a clown’s. 

“Just a… bag of some sort,” he says.

“That’s my deli bag, John.”

“I’ll bring it back.”

“Why do you want my deli bag?” He vanishes and calls out from the hallway something about visiting his mother. Something about her being very sick.

“I’ll see you later, Marge, all right?” And he’s out the door, letting a gust of wind cartwheel across the overdue bills that spill from our countertops and grandfather clock.

An infantile whimper rises from somewhere at my feet. Baby Edith’s at the age where everything’s edible and nothing’s consequential. She twirls a doll in her tubby hands then wedges the toy into her mouth. Redgie floats out of his room wearing pajamas.

“Ma.” He rubs his eyes. 

“Yeah, baby.”

“Charlie stoled my robot.” His face contorts and I prepare for a holler that could resurrect the dead.

“Redge, do me a favor and hand me those cigs over there. No baby, that’s baking soda. There. Thank you.”

“He took it and…” He hiccups painfully, then tugs at his shirt and shuffles his feet. “And I told him it was mine.”

“We share, darling, remember?”

“No but… He has his own, Mama. My robot’s names is Galaxy Robert and it’s mine’s already. His is a different kinda robot. Member you bought it for me for Christmas?”

I scoop Edith off the ground and walk her to the nursery, and that’s when I notice it’s missing: our record player. A big clean square in the dust of the table remains, one that wasn’t there last night when I curled up on the couch with a glass of wine and Ella Fitzgerald sailed down from the heavens.

From a faraway underwater village, Redge peppers me with “Ma’s,” and I can barely hear him because two images are inundating my senses, revolving in my mind: record player, deli bag record player deli bag bag deli record bag deli player. Player. 

I scour the house while Redge shuffles behind me, desperately trying to turn his footsteps into earthquake-inducing stomps. (Don’t we all.) I can’t find it anywhere, so I retreat to the kitchen once the optics become too much to bear: someone else on some other couch playing some record next to some husband whose heart once belonged to me.

“He’s mine, Mama. He’s not Charlie’s he’s mine.”

I can’t look at my son then. I wish I could explain it to him. Somehow interrupt his three-station radio programming of candy, toys, and unshakable justice and broadcast how deeply I understand him. Hold his tiny face and make the similarity of our pains comprehensible to him—someone who can’t count to 100.

“I just…” Redge blubbers, snot glistening down his face. “I just want him back, Mama.”

Me too, baby. 

When his silhouette vanishes from my peripheral, I’m left staring at the window and the geese that silently crack across the skyline. 

***

Carrie Ann’s one of those actors who does everything like an actor—sips wine, laughs to the ceiling, greets my children with a carnival ride embrace that sends their legs flailing. Through and through, she’s a pretender—except in the role of my friend. In that sense, she’s the only one who’s never pretended. 

I call her over because I’m desperate. 

“It’s just a ridiculous thing to say, Margey,” she tells me, surveying the record player table. “It’s just a ridiculous thing for him to say, and there’s no two ways about it.” 

“How so?” 

“How so? Picture this.” She sets her wine glass down and fixes her hair. “I’m a 30-year-old man. I live in—.”

“Oh Christ, Carrie Ann. I’m no good at this game. You know I’m no good at this.”

“I’m a 30-year-old man, and I have a gorgeous wife,” she continues. “I commute to the city five days a week, kiss my gorgeous wife each morning. Three lovely children.” Redge sprints out of his bedroom then, Charlie at his heels, both of them screaming with delight and shooting imaginary bullets at each other. It has started snowing, so when the boys shriek and dart around the grand piano in the living room, only their outlines are visible against the bobbing silk curtains and in the instrument’s glossy enamel. 

“Did I mention my three lovely children?” Carrie Ann resumes. “I have a solid job, too. Perfectly respectable, makes good money. And that’s my life.” She adjusts her heel strap and shrugs. 

“I come home a little late one night. My wife brushes it off, knows how hard I work. Then it becomes a week, and my children start asking why Daddy’s never home for dinner anymore.” A bird lands on the windowsill outside and assaults an acorn. 

“Now she’s growing suspicious, Margey is—my beautiful wife. I tell her it’s nothing, I’m just busy. Then one morning I take our record player—clean off the table. Because my mother’s very sick now, you see. So sick. Her spirits need lifting. She needs music.” Carrie Ann scoffs and fishes a cigarette out of her bag.

“‘I’m going to visit my mother’? Please.” She cups a tiny flame in her hands and lets ribbons of smoke pour from her nostrils. “Frankly, Margaret? It’s bullshit.”

 I already know this of course. But something in Carrie Ann’s strong feminine devotion convinces me all over again. Good friends, like all fierce protectors, have a way of doing this brilliantly. Have you noticed? 

“He stole your music,” she says. “It’s that simple.” 

Later that day, Carrie Ann and I take the subway to a bookstore in the city.

The experience is both new and familiar every time because of the passengers. Men in fedoras, dozing teenagers, baby-cradling mothers—we make up stories for all of them. Carrie Ann says it’s good character-building practice, observing other people. But it only ever makes me feel melancholy. I watch herds shuffle in and out, and all I can do is wonder if I’d be happier following them to another world—somewhere where I held different hands, danced in a different kitchen, kissed different lips. 

I focus on a woman thumbing through a magazine. Advertisements whip by on the subway tiles behind her. She deserves a Coke! they say. Her relief from heartburn is only a Fizz, Pop! Pop! Away. She’ll get there faster in a Cadillac.

She sniffles and flips a page. 

We rattle out of the industrial ecosystem and forge into the world while bright squares of light float all over the train. They pass over Magazine Woman’s eye and turn it the color of mosquito wings—green flicker gold flicker green. Tops of heads sway. For a moment I imagine we’re in the ribcage of a whale, soaring over the city. A child picks his nose and gawks out the window.

The subway hisses to a halt and Magazine Woman rises to depart. For some reason, I don’t want her to leave. I don’t want to say goodbye to her cherry-colored aura, Mary Janes, or her manicured bob. But she scampers away from the platform, one hand securing the little hat to her head, the other shielding the sun from her eyes. Then a weary businessman takes her seat, and we’re lugging forward again. 

I realize, watching her silhouette shrink on the platform, that I’ve made peace with something: People will enter and people will leave, but we will move forward regardless because we’re on a route with hundreds of somewhere-to-be’s. One person’s departure does not signal the end of the ride. It only frees a seat for someone else. 

Carrie Ann taps my arm when it’s our turn to exit. 

Though I’ve lived in this city my entire life, a strange sensation dawns on me when we walk away. It’s as if I’ve never been here before.

The bookstore is three-storied and never fails to take care of us and our desire to be somewhere else. Surprisingly cramped and small on the inside, its shelves abound with books wedged so tightly that they protrude from the walls like a sailor’s yellow shipwrecked teeth. 

A teenager hangs tinsel snowflakes from the ceiling, and a melody arises from the pianist in the corner. At some point, Carrie Ann drifts away, and I find her outside on the well-gardened patio, staring at the glowing gossamer clouds. Eventually, she turns towards me with wisps of hair wandering around her face like jellyfish antennae. 

And it’s ablaze then suddenly—my belief in life. Some inexplicable aurora borealis materializes over the threads of sunlight and the glinting snowflakes and my beautiful, beautiful friend in the garden. 

When the pianist stops playing, raindrops of applause fall around him, but I can still hear the music. All at once, it is mine again.

---

Madison Durand is a junior studying English Literature and Psychology at the University of Florida. She’s worked as an Apprentice for the Breakbread Literacy Project and currently serves as an editor for the Florida Undergraduate Law Review. Her short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction pieces have been published in The Little Patuxent Review, Penumbra Literary & Arts Journal, Young Writers USA, Florida Theater on Stage, and Lunch Ticket. When she’s not writing, reading, or watching Wes Anderson films, she enjoys learning languages and running away from her Siberian Forest cat (not at the same time).

---

27 September 2024