The Storm at the Door by Stefan Merrill Block Page A

must convey them perfectly, even if she perceives invisible foundational fissuring, the pilings shifting and snapping beneath her. Most adult failures, Katharine believes, can be attributed to the failure of that conveyance, adults marooned at the age at which their parents failed them.
    When Katharine was only four, for example, her doctor diagnosed her with a heart murmur, and for a time the doctors believed she wouldn’t live to eighteen. No longer worried for their daughter’s adulthood, Katharine’s parents concerned themselves only with fulfilling her wants, making her siblings toughen in the way children ought to, while Katharine received only her family’s gifts and attention. Her heart’s syncopation eventually self-corrected, but her childhood has remained her childhood. And now she must imitate an adult, she who grew up never having to do a thing for herself. Conversely, Frederick has told Katharine how his own parents, fracturing under the pressuresof the Great Depression, made clear to Frederick, at twelve, that his boyhood was nearing its end, that the family’s future solvency would depend, in no small part, on him. As Katharine has, in ways that shame her, remained that needy sick girl, so has her husband remained petty, boisterous, subject to his megrims, possessing the emotional constitution of a twelve-year-old.
    And so, what if Katharine allows herself to fail her daughters now? Jillian is only five; she could remain forever impetuous, always expecting others to receive and grant her demands. Louise’s common eight-year-old experiments with deception could proliferate into pathology. Susie, at thirteen, could never shake her yearling awkwardness, her aversion to others’ eyes, her uncertainty of the worth of her opinions. Rebecca’s fourteen-year-old irony could deepen, she could remain forever disaffected and defiant (Katharine cannot let herself think too clearly of what Rebecca might allow those boys she sees).
    Doctors and relatives act so certain, and that is how Katharine must act as well. But if she could just clearly explain what has happened to someone not involved, perhaps she could understand it herself.
Teaching
, her math teacher once told her,
is the best way to learn
. Katharine lifts the phone and looks up the number in her address book.
    She tells herself
Yes
once, then
No
three times, and then she dials the number anyway. Just after it begins to ring, the voice is in her ear.
    Hello?
    Hi, Tat. It’s Katharine.
    Katharine?
    Why has she called Tat? Tat is hardly a friend. She is only the closest to what Katharine might call a friend in Graveton. Does she really want to unburden herself to an acquaintance? Butmaybe Katharine’s purpose is not only to seek commiseration. It is, more honestly, something else: a chance at explaining herself and the abject state in which her family has concluded the summer to someone in Graveton before she returns there, and the news becomes evident.
    Yeah
, Katharine says, then adds,
Merrill?
    Katharine Merrill? Is that you?
    Tat affects the perfect tone so effortlessly. Her voice is just right, an enthusiasm that transmits only delight, making Katharine feel extraordinary while simultaneously forgiving her for not at all being the friend Tat would like her to be. Often, when Katharine agrees to attend Tat’s bridge nights, she panics at the last moment and grasps for the handiest excuse. But Katharine envies Tat and her friends. Together, as middle-aged women, they are in continuity with what they have always been. Just the girls, still laughing together at their stories. They laugh about their children as they once laughed about boys at school, teachers, lackluster report cards. These women raise children without becoming fundamentally different from the women they were before they had families. Katharine, by contrast, was once one thing, a young woman hungry for society, and then she became something entirely different, an anxious mother, the wife