lit hubMargaret Anne “Moddie” Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist. She was trying not to think about it, trying to have a decent time in her new life, but invariably some bleak thought would draw her back and then the memories would start, vivid, cinematic, relentless, like a brainwashing clip reel for a cult with an unclear mission statement.
It was summertime. She was currently sitting in the backseat of a car on a dark, damp evening, looking out of the rolled-down window, consciously relaxing her muscles by group. The streetlights illuminated round sections of the green maple leaves that formed a canopy over the street. The air smelled good, like clean mulch with subtle undertones of motor oil. The trees, the smells, the sounds, the sights, the breezes, all activated a primal sensation in Moddie, a sensation she felt between her solar plexus and crotch, a feeling that was somewhat similar to unwelcome sexual arousal. She relaxed her shoulders. Her arms. Attempted to avoid slipping back into her dreary memories as the car drove through the night.
The breakup had been precipitated by Moddie, who impulsively had sex three times with her coworker Toby. He was a colleague, not a superior, but treated Moddie like his underling. He was a foolish man. Toby was muscular and short with a vein that stood out on his forehead, and Moddie liked to publicly humiliate him with casual mockery. She knew no one liked him, and in the break room everyone said that he was “verbally abusive.” Moddie was in charge of sorting the mail and answering the phones, so she knew about his court-mandated anger management classes, which were on Thursdays.
After she and Toby had sex for the third and final time, Moddie sat on a park bench to read Walt Whitman. Nick had been out of town on some kind of artistic retreat, but he would be waiting for her when she got home. As she pretended to read the poems, Moddie realized that she had been effectively dead, without a single emotional or spiritual or intellectual stirring in her adult life, until this tyrannical little idiot, a man she had no respect for or interest in, had harangued her into touching his dick in the supply closet.
How cruel, yes, life could be.
The breeze stirred her bangs, and her heart. As a young person, she’d made a vow to live within the pulse of life and to avoid the death-in-life that the poets all said was worse than death itself. If she stayed with Nick, she would break that vow and continue to live this dead, boring life. She blamed a lot of her problems on Nick’s vanity. Moddie admired Uncle Walt, the crazy gay tree fucker, but she did not admire herself, a boring woman with trivial, boring problems. She walked from the park bench back to her desk, past the bullet-chipped storefront windows, weaving between broken glass and empty patterned dime bags, back to her seat in the lobby of the sleek and highly regarded educational nonprofit for underserviced youth, where she filed grant applications and acted as a liaison between administration, teachers (or rather “educators”—she never understood why this needed to sound like a euphemism), and community, and where she had to work as a kind of hostage negotiator for her boss, Tracy, who wanted the children to go do things like cheer up the craps corner with yarn bombs, insisting this would give them what she called “cultural capital,” another euphemism.
She got to her desk. And she sat and sat, dazed to the brim with richest nausea. Strong light came in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, dazzling her. If Toby had walked by, she might have projectile vomited on the center of her corporate-donated thirty-two-inch Retina display monitor.
She drove home. The nausea ripened into a dissociative state. She didn’t know what would happen when she opened the door to their apartment. Her movements were automatic. She was numb. It was the strangest she’d ever felt. It was as if she were inside an orb, watching as the actions of some other thing flowed through her. It was a dream. She was innocent. Of course, she felt guilty about the odious cheating, but she did not feel like she was about to begin a process of confession and repentance. In fact, that was unthinkable, because she was not sorry.
Her hand turned the knob of the front door, pushed, and the door opened on Nick lying flaccidly on the couch, not doing anything except looking at his phone. His brain was rotten, and all of his opinions were inherited, none of them spontaneous, completely rotten. His suitcases were dumped all over the floor. He had reheated and eaten all of the leftover chili, the chili that had taken her three hours to prepare, the chili she was planning to have, and he had left everything in the sink for her to wash. She did all of the laundry, cooked all of the meals, took out the trash, cleaned, shopped, paid the bills, all of it, he did none of it, she did all of it, holy god for ten years all of it. And what was Moddie making room for with all of these chores? These things took hours, meaning Nick took hours from Moddie, and what did he do with these hours, what great life of the mind was she aiding by giving him all of these hours? Looking at him with this thought in her mind made the blood rise up in her ears and made her feel faint, again. He even spoke to her in baby talk. Moddie’s lips were numb and it felt like she was hovering inches above the ground. She’d told him in the first year, please, anything but baby talk, but her handsome boy, he was always so very hungwy. Moddie had been standing over him as he lay on the couch texting for at least one minute, maybe two, each submerged in their own private narrative.
He was probably texting with that girl he’d met at an art fair who, according to him, had been “actually” quite encouraging of all the bad behavioral patterns and habits and attitudes of his that always dragged him deep down into a time-sucking catatonic depression that Moddie was left to deal with whether she wanted to or not, goddamn it, that bitch.
Nick looked up at Moddie and his lip involuntarily snarled like a mean old goopy Maltese. Moddie felt her spirit puke out in anger. The words came out like heavenly music, as if Christ himself had reached his hand down and put his fingers in her mouth and used her as a puppet to transmit his divine decree, that she break up with him that instant.
In the moment before she felt herself speak, her mind became clear and analytical like a man’s. Aside from a few compulsory and awkward concessions, they hadn’t fucked in years. They didn’t have or want children, they didn’t have or want any large shared items like a house. The one time Moddie brought up marriage, Nick raised his eyebrows and said, “I don’t think so.” He told her she would make a terrible mother but said nothing after she handed him his peanut butter sandwich and said, “Oh, I don’t know, I think I’m doing an okay job.” He’d taken to saying things like “All men are more likely to be attracted to women in their twenties, because they just have better bodies and more open minds” and “When men and women break up in middle age it’s uniformly pathetic for the woman. Inevitably she goes on some humiliating journey of self-discovery, joins a gym, gets a fun and funky haircut and some dimwitted affirmational therapist, and all she can manage to snag is a beat-down old divorcé with a broken dick and some other woman’s children. Maybe he takes her on a few sad little vacations to Barbados. Maybe she wears a hot-pink bikini with her big ass cheeks hanging out. Maybe she gets a tattoo on one of her cheeks that says ‘YOLO.’ ” He started talking this way soon after Moddie turned thirty-one, insisting they were deep into middle age, fat, neutered, depressing, the walking dead, but Toby had said she had movie boobs, and Toby looked like a tiny Channing Tatum and he didn’t have any children or enough money to go to Barbados, so it turned out Nick wasn’t a genie who could see into the future, just a mean man, and realizing this did make a difference. She was no longer afraid of the endless gaping void of loneliness. She spoke the words that coursed through her—this just is not working.
Whatever tense cloud of energy that had been hovering in the room between them burst. Nick began to cry, and Moddie felt her whole heart and chest and self rush toward him, my poor sweet baby, I’m so, so sorry.
She moved into a shitty furnished sublet and spent most of her free time either violently sobbing or on the phone with Nick apologizing profusely for dumping him, and spent her days at the office avoiding Toby. She got no rest. Nick called her almost every night and kept her on the phone late, well past her bedtime, telling her how angry he was and telling her that he didn’t understand how she could throw him away like that, like a piece of garbage, and sometimes he asked her what kind of a person could do something like that. What kind of person, Moddie? A piece of garbage. When she tried bringing up some of the things he’d done that had hurt her, he said he was going to jump in front of a train if he even thought about it for one second. After these phone calls, Moddie would sit in the corner and rock back and forth sobbing, wondering why she was such a cruel and hateful person who was sort of like a living poison, and why was she always saying and doing such mean horrible things like treating people like pieces of garbage. Sometimes she thought it might be safer for everyone if she were dead, even for her parents, who were surely getting tired of her daily, sobbing, hysterical phone calls.
They tried to reconcile like this for months. Nick said he didn’t want to meet up in person unless they were going to get back together—it’s too hard—then he said he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, he felt dead, and so Moddie, still in love and deeply moved by his suffering, caved one night and said, “I want to come home.”
This seemed to cheer Nick up for a moment.
But later, as soon as Moddie started to mention specific plans, when and where to meet, whether or not Moddie should look for a permanent apartment or if she should delay with the aim of moving back in, Nick became alternatingly cocky and coy—oh, he’d never meant to imply he was ready to get back together, these things take time—and, after much pressing, he eventually did agree to meet up at their old apartment, where they had an unspeakable night, truly among the worst of Moddie’s nights, during which he revealed he’d just begun a relationship with a twenty-four-year-old arts administrator and veritable shit-for-brains named Gracie.
Moddie knew all about Gracie, oh yes. One night, after a party where Gracie had clung to Nick’s arm, saying, “I’ve always wondered about you, because when I checked our astrological charts we were a match, and I’ve always blah blah blah blah blah . . .” Nick gave a speech about how interesting Gracie was and Moddie, who at that moment had been particularly tanked, said something unkind about Gracie’s physical appearance and then said she didn’t think men were attracted to women who looked like that and Nick said, “Uuh, [disdainful patronizing chortle], I have no complaints with the way she looks.”
“No, I said I thought men,” said Moddie, and he threw her a shitty glance. “What’s her last name?”
After a pause he said, “Schneider.” “Aaaaahhh, Herr Schnei-dah.”
“Yeah, I believe that would be Fräulein,” said Nick, who then winked despite himself, in a way that Moddie found deeply unattractive.
Moddie looked up Gracie and found her website, which included a substantial amount of self-portrait photography, which of course Moddie began to critique until Nick started muttering, “You’re such a fucking prude you’re so stuck up you’re jealous that people find her sexually attractive there’s nothing wrong with someone wanting to have a website where they can express themselves through photographs and self-portraits it’s a good website the photography is good it has good qualities it shows sensitivity you’re such a fucking prude you’ve always been a prude and a killjoy and a drag and a mentally unstable asshole you’re just mean not interesting or funny or smart or cool and I’ve thought you were a closet queer for years.”
The things about being a closet queer and a prude hurt, of course, but did not hurt as much as the notion that he—that anyone—could possibly interact with this work and fool themselves into thinking that it had any artistic merit.
“You probably respond to her work,” said Moddie, “because it is one hundred percent nonthreatening to your own work, in terms of its quality, and is therefore completely unthreatening to your masculinity. I’ll give it to her, if she’s doing this on purpose, she’s a fucking genius. If she’s going out of her way to make work that makes her seem like an insipid moron who a man might be able to teach a few things, she’s [chef’s kiss]. Brahvah, mein Herr, as her people might say.”
Moddie drained her beer at the precise moment Nick picked up and threw her sketchbook across the kitchen. It hit the wall and landed on its open pages, pathetic and rumpled, resembling garbage. Moddie looked at Nick, who said nothing more. They stayed eye-locked until Moddie started talking in a quiet, measured tone, “I’m going to hurt you so fucking much one day you won’t be able to breathe right for months. This version of me, right here, this one now, I’m the fucking Manchurian candidate. I’ve now sworn an oath with god and country to destroy you. Someday something’s going to set me off and I’m going to come back and finish what you started here tonight and you won’t even know what hit you and you won’t ever be the same for the rest of your life.”
Nick rolled his eyes and shook his head slowly in disgust. “You haven’t even seen The Manchurian Candidate. You never have any idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”
After learning that Nick and Gracie were together, and after a few more harrowing conversations with Nick, the memories of which clicked in and out of her awareness like a stupid semaphore, Moddie spent two months in a fugue state, going into the office like a zombie, falling asleep as soon as she got home, and then one day she called her best friend, Nina, who lived in X, to explain, again, that she couldn’t take another moment of her stupid fucking life. “Not another fucking minute, or I’m going to coldcock myself with a hammer.”
Nina said, “Fuck it, just move here instead,” and told her how cheap apartments were. They were startlingly cheap. “Maybe you could freelance.”
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From Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler. Copyright © 2024 by Halle Butler. Publisher by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
