ABSTRACT

WHAT IF YOU’RE LONELY: JESSICA STORIES

by Michael Stoneberg

This novel-in-stories follows Jessica through the difficulties of her early twenties to her mid- thirties. During this period of her life she struggles with loneliness and depression, attempting to find some form of meaningful connection through digital technologies as much as face-to-face interaction, coming to grips with a non-normative sexuality, finding and losing her first love and dealing with the resultant constant pull of this person on her psyche, and finally trying to find who in fact she, Jessica, really is, what version of herself is at her core. The picture of her early adulthood is drawn impressionistically, through various modes and styles of narration and points of view, as well as through found texts, focusing on preludes and aftermaths and asking the reader to intuit and imagine the spaces between.

WHAT IF YOU’RE LONELY:

JESSICA STORIES

A Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Department of English

by

Michael Stoneberg

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2014

Advisor______Margaret Luongo

Reader______Joseph Bates

Reader______Madelyn Detloff

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Revision Page 1

2. Invoice for Therapy Services Page 11

3. Craigslist Page 12

4. Some Things that Make Us—Us Page 21

5. RE: Recent Account Activity Page 30

6. Sirens Page 31

7. Hand-Gun Page 44

8. Hugh Speaks Page 48

9. “The Depressed Person” Page 52

10. Happy Hour: Last Day/First Day Page 58

11. OkJessica Page 61

12. What If You’re Lonely Page 74

13. Suburban Still-Life Page 83

14. Heartland Theater Company Regrets to Inform You Page 85

15. Everybody Laugh: A Suicidal Porch Party Page 86

16. A Jessica Prepares Page 109

17. Collected Wedding Ephemera Page 114

18. Holy Crap: It’s a Girl! Page 121

19. Cindy Texts Page 122

20. Overhead Perspective Page 124

ii

For Whitney Danger

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the faculty of Miami University for their support, especially my thesis chair and committee members—Margaret Luongo, Joseph Bates, and Madelyn Detloff—for their feedback and help with this project. Special thanks to the workshop leaders not mentioned above who saw pieces of this novel come through their workshops and provided excellent comments and support: Eric Goodman and Brian Roley. Many thanks, also, to my fellow graduate students in the four fiction workshops I took during my time at Miami (you are too numerous to list here, but you know who you are: thanks for all your help). I feel like thousands of people helped me complete this project directly or indirectly, and would like to thank the following few especially: Alison Thompson for providing the inspiration for the ending and for being my OkCupid advisor and research assistant; Whitney Danger for friendship, support, and endless inspiration; K.C. Novak for her inspiration, playwriting/acting expertise and feedback; Luke Ketter, Sarah Devine, Alex McElroy, Alex Friedman, and Edwin R. Perry for their feedback and encouragement. Marjorie Sandor also deserves heartfelt thanks for starting me on this path as an undergraduate and helping me dig deeper into character than I’ve ever dug before. Also on the list is every other poor soul who has listened to me talk myself silly about this thing for nigh two years. Special and grateful thanks to Heather Dannison for listening, helping me through some rough times, and introducing me to DEAR MAN.

And of course, endless thanks to my parents for encouraging me to pursue my artistic endeavors and not even blinking when I threw away any hope of a lucrative engineering career.

I’m sure I’ve left out myriad humans, and I regret that already, but thank you to all of my friends, colleagues, and family members. I would never have made it without you.

Finally, thank you to anyone and everyone who reads the following pages. I like you.

iv

Revision

Here’s what happened: I was born, grew up fairly pretty in a subdued way, did well in school, got a job at a hotel as a sophomore in high school, stayed in town for college, kept the hotel job despite the manager being a skeeve, graduated, got rejected from grad schools, once then twice, kept the hotel job, and totally got punked by this bitchy mom, parent to some prospective student, nodded meekly—a nice, quiet little girl—and felt terrible for the rest of my life.

*

No, here’s what happened: I was born and was unhappy, even though I had the best little life a little girl could hope for, even in the shadow of an all-American big brother, hit puberty late and was shy as shit in high school, got a job at a hotel because the manager thought I was somewhat cute and pliable, never went to dances, played soccer but never went to the parties, walked the drama-geek/jock line, and then sort of got asked out by one awkward boy my senior year—a pimple-faced drama dude—but nothing ever came of it, no first kiss, virgin lips, had plenty of time to study, and I graduated one of three salutatorians—my parents and grandparents were super proud. And then I moved on to college, got a full ride because I’m pretty bright and my mom worked in the admin building as an accountant so I got the staff discount, and I was still painfully shy, but had built-in high school friends who got stuck in town and never got out, but I quickly outgrew them, and finally, my fifth and last year, a boy kissed me post-midnight lying in the grass in the quad, but it didn’t work out, finished college thinking I’d missed all the experiences college entailed, and this one day at work, this total bitch of a mother, whose idiot daughter probably couldn’t even get into the community college, had the nerve to criticize me and my life choices at the check-in desk, and I felt so pissed off and depressed I thought I’d shrivel right there and die a virgin.

* 1

What really happened was this: I grew up sad and lonely, had loving parents and a brother who was a step ahead of me in everything, a couple close friends—one a boy, one a girl—just because that’s the way it worked out, but hey, the parity’s nice. And then I aced the hardest math and physics classes the high school offered, aced the toughest English classes, wrote stories for half the soccer team in a creative writing class, graduated with a 4.0, but was still a salutatorian because of some weird 4.1 bullshit (of course, big bro got valedictorian and gave a rousing speech two years earlier), graduated college summa cum laude, which is pretty fucking good, and it was a tough market for grad schools and I aimed too high anyway the first go-round, all of them ranked in the top ten, got rejected, and so I tried again, got into a couple places sans funding, but I couldn’t survive any more debt than the credit cards I kept applying for and slowly maxing out, despite the paycheck, despite budgeting down to nothing, due to circumstances beyond my control—that ole story. So I passed on grad school the second time, thinking third time’s a charm, something everyone in my family wouldn’t stop saying to me in that condescending false-cheery way so that it lodged in my head, and I’m thinking it even now, Christ, third time’s a smarmy fucking charm. And I was still working hard at the hotel, putting on my brightest smile even though I thought of suicide more than a couple times, even though the manager hit on me constantly, “Hey, Jess, my little princess,” like he’s Wordsworth, and fuck the name Jess anyway, it’s “Jessica,” the dickhead. But I was still doing things on the side, getting roles in the local theater productions, writing something that might turn into a play, keeping my head up, “Buck up, kiddo” my grandma said, and I did, I literally did buck up, despite my love-life being a chasm and the few friends I had moving away and doing things with their lives or sinking into endlessly uninteresting stoner purgatory, and then I had to move back in with my parents when my best friend got into grad school in Ohio; my parents were thrilled, god bless them, to have a deadbeat 20-something re-nesting, but we quickly drove each other up a wall. Until I was at work one day, and this woman—you could tell from her jowly-fucking- face that she was a total stuck-up asshole—comes up, and I’m being my usual helpful, customer- is-king-or-queen self and checking her in efficiently and pleasantly, asking what she’s in town for, making delightfully polite and engaging conversation, and she says she’s with her 2 daughter—who I assumed was waiting out in the car, sucking her idiotic thumb while the other one’s crammed up her ass, because there’s no way any fruit of this woman’s withered loins turned out okay—checking out the state school in town, my alma mater, so I’m like, “Hey, that’s where I graduated from,” cheerily, conversationally ending on a preposition, and she looks at me, one of those up-and-down incredulous looks, and huffs out a “Huh, can’t be that great a school” under her breath, like I’m not even standing right there in front of her, takes her keycard and turns her back, so I hop over the counter with nimbleness I’d never had in life until that glorious, triumphant instant, and, fistful of hair in one hand, spin her around, slap her flabby cheek with the other, scream in her face, get fired, go to prison on assault charges, don that sexy orange jumpsuit, and feel great for the rest of my life.

*

Which is bullshit, of course, because I’m a coward at heart, a true stereotypical 50s housewife, and so I stood there watching that dimwitted woman saunter out the door to her waiting daughter. Because I’m the girl that was born skittish, took almost 24 hours of coaxing to get me to abandon my mother’s womb, though legend has it big bro took even longer. And then I grew into the girl who couldn’t even ask out Jeffery Chambers for the Sadie Hawkins dance my senior year like I told Rachel and Hugh I would, I swore to them, they wanted me to succeed in something so badly, to step outside of my comfort zone and not wither, and Jeffery was pretty alright, maybe a bit out of my league, but not a monumental stretch, and he laughed at a dumb joke I made once in AP US History, and might’ve even said yes, who knows? But, oh no, this is the true cowardice right here, the worst part: I couldn’t even bring myself to tell them, the closest friends I’d ever had—we’d been friends since, like, third grade— that I really kinda wanted to ask out Georgia Powers. But how the fuck does anyone do that in a little hick town in Oregon, where “dyke” gets bandied about in the locker room at any false move?

*

3 Here’s how someone does that: she is born gorgeous and perfect, to loving, successful parents and has a popular, supportive older sibling. She has dark brown curls and blemish-less golden-brown skin, straight perfect teeth, boobs that required a sports bra in eighth grade, no need for corrective lenses, plays midfield on the soccer team and still manages to score four or five goals per season, wins prom queen as a junior, student body prez senior year, and one day, after practice, she just reaches for and grabs the chin of Georgia Powers when she thinks they’re alone in the hallway, walking to the parking lot, gently turns Powers’ face toward her, having caught her off guard so she’s stalled mid-sentence, lips half-open, leans in, and kisses her, releases her, smiles, and picks up the conversation as if nothing happened, leaving Miss Powers to shake off her shock, giggle, and jog lightly to catch up to her as they exit the hall into late- afternoon sun, like a goddamn movie, gear bags riding their hips. But that wasn’t me; that was Linda Jackson-Downing, and she didn’t really come out until college anyway, spewing “dyke” left and right with the rest of them, and poor mannish Leslie Mitchell bore the brunt, even after she started dating Dan Wright junior year. But hell, what do I know of Linda’s interior world anyway? Who am I to judge?

*

But no, that’s not the whole of it either: picture a girl named Jessica, who should be happy, has a lot of reasons to be—loving, supportive parents, who are sweet even if they don’t quite understand her, a brother who’s kind of aloof, but a decent, if insufferably successful, dude, a middle class home in a small Oregon town, academic success early on, and grandparents who spoil her just as much as they did her brother. She’s generally liked, if quiet and reserved. Has a couple close friends she shares a lot with, but never truly opens herself up for reasons she’s not quite sure of (but we can hazard some guesses, just between she and I, I’m sure). She plays soccer all through elementary and middle and high school, doing pretty well as a defender, and she’s on defense pretty much all the time, on and off the field: wary, guarded, timid except when it comes to keeping people out. She’s got her eye on a few boys in elementary school, a few girls too (though she doesn’t think of it that way at the time), but after a painfully horrid note-passing incident, she never tries asking any of them out. This trend continues into high school, where she treads water around the 4 edges of popularity, never getting much attention, never making waves. She has crushes that stick with her a long time, but never pursues them because her brain twists around and around the various things that could go wrong, her lack of experience, the other suitors more attractive than her, the ways in which she fails to fill out certain garments, what people will say or do or think in her direction. In the soccer off-season, she’s involved in theater productions, small supporting roles on the periphery, but she plays them to perfection, falling neatly into other lives, staying in character every second she’s on stage, even when the limelight is on the leads—she loves having some handle on who she’s supposed to be, if only for an hour on stage. She is a stunning Hippolyta one year, though the people un-invested in her personally don’t really notice, but Hugh and Rachel are there a-beaming opening night, having run lines with her for months, and once as she’s declaiming her lines, she catches Hugh in the audience, mouthing the words she’s speaking. She has a crush on Georgia Powers and invites her (and the rest of the team) to see her before the production ends, but no one shows, or they do, but they aren’t Georgia, and she doesn’t register them in the audience. On the last night, a man comes up to her after the show and says he’s directing the season’s community theater productions and invites her to audition. It’s small-time, but her stomach still tumbles in little somersaults. Her parents care enough about her to push her to get a job as soon as she’s old enough, and she doesn’t realize at the time, but picks it up later after she’s moved out, that they aren’t making as much money as she’s always thought and want her to be able to pay her own way, just as much to ignore their waning financial support as to instill good work ethic. She sends off a resume to a few places and hears back from the hotel out by the freeway, something with “Suites” in the name where someone has some vague connection to her parents, and the week before the interview, she sees Linda Jackson-Downing kiss Georgia Powers in the hallway after practice. So she puts on a professional blouse-and-knee-length-skirt getup for the interview, slipping out of sneakers and into shiny black flats in the car. She is nervous, stumbling once in the parking lot, and when she asks the receptionist the way to the interview room, her voice cracks a little. There are two men sitting there, one older and disinterested, one in his thirties, not unattractive, sure, a supposed friend of a friend of her parents whose search for a new 5 receptionist found its way to her ear. She sits down and registers how this younger guy shifts in his seat and straightens his back. She’s inexperienced but not altogether naïve, and so she pretends it’s just another role: the interviewee who flutters her eyelids a bit and gets the job, the interviewee with that kind of confidence and success, who can set aside her scruples when practicality demands. When she gets uncomfortable meeting his eyes, she examines the reflection in her shoe where it hangs, dangling off her crossed knee. The interview seems interminable (“I am aweary of this moon. Would he would change!” she thinks to herself, and the thought makes her smile for the audience), but after it is finished, she can barely remember an instant of it. The two men say they must confer, but they will let her know as soon as possible. The older man’s face never changes from the vacant stare he wore since she entered, but the 30-something winks at her, and his hand lingers as she shakes it. She contacts the civic theater director and auditions for the role of the daughter in the upcoming play about a widowed mother falling for a new man. It feels like a steep fall from Shakespeare, but the actors are high-spirited and welcoming. She’s cast, the show goes on, and it’s a pretty okay production, she guesses, her parents and Rachael and Hugh gracing the seats on opening night as usual. She graduates high school having never been kissed, applies to the local state school and only the local state school, because she hasn’t really developed a longing for anything elsewhere, and sometimes staying with what one knows is okay. Her grades and SAT and AP scores get her accepted to the Physics department, where she drifts for two full years before she gets sick of it and transfers to theater. She’s moved in with one of her best friends, Hugh, which raises eyebrows at home and prompts mild mockery from her brother at Harvard, but it’s strictly platonic, until Hugh confesses his love for her one night when they’re both drunk, and she sleeps in her car, because she’s embarrassed and confused and doesn’t want Hugh that way but doesn’t want to disappoint him, he’s always been there for her. She works at the hotel twenty hours a week during the school year and forty in the summer. The manager, James, schedules her to work when he works and flirts with her, and because she’s not used to the attention she kind of likes it for a while and uses his affections to get the shifts she wants.

6 At some point, she realizes her parents can’t really afford to continue supporting her grandparents, so she sits down with Grandma and works out a budget and helps pay the electric and looks into independent living possibilities, because Grandpa’s getting worse but no one seems to want to admit it, and there’s no way Grandma can take care of the house alone any more. She almost has a breakdown several times, things with Hugh are strained, James is getting creepier, her paychecks go to Grandma, and her small bills go on credit cards. Because she switched majors, she takes a fifth year, there’s a guy in a band who plays the townie bar every once in a while she has a crush on, and a girl in her Shakespeare class that reminds her of Georgia Powers, she moves out with Hugh and moves in with Rachel, who sometimes gets frustrated with how mopey her roommate gets and suggests a therapist a few times. Hugh spirals and goes on antidepressants, she ends up making out with the band guy in the quad one night which sort of surprises her, but it’s not that great, his conversation isn’t compelling, and he doesn’t seem that interested or interesting after all, and then she graduates, summa cum laude and has no idea where that leaves her. Hugh moves to Portland, and Rachel moves to Ohio for grad school, but our Jessica’s just been rejected by the five playwriting programs she applied to, so she moves back in with her parents, where she tacks the rejection letters to the wall behind her door, a sort of cilice for her eyeballs. She’s at work one day the following summer, having just stared at the rejection letters as she got dressed so that her self-esteem is low, and James sidles behind the desk. The place is dead, a late-summer Tuesday when nothing’s happening in town, and the only couple she’s checked in so far is from the Netherlands on their way to Seattle. James is doing his usual good-natured flirting, rhyming “Jess” with “princess”— Shakespeare wishes he’d had his wit—asking about boyfriends and talking about his Mustang, but she’s really not in the mood, so she smiles and takes it for as long as she can, but finally snaps a little and tells him to fuck off and do what he’s paid to do and leave her the fuck alone, and she’s shocked that she said it out loud, and kind of thrilled. He looks hurt at first, and she’s apologetic by nature, so she says she’s sorry without really meaning it, she’s just had a rough week. But then his eyes get strange, and she can’t really put her finger on it, but it’s like they shift from one shade of blue to another. He reaches for her chin, and she leans back but not far enough, and he pulls her face toward him, and it doesn’t feel nice or natural or loving, and he 7 closes his eyes, and she’s thinking I have to knee him in the balls, I have to knee him in the balls, but at the same time she knows she needs this job and so she does something she never thought she would have done, Miss Defense, Miss Demure, Miss Reticence, Miss Supporting Role. What she does is she thinks of herself in the third person, and this other Jessica is stronger and more willful than she is and can push James’ chest away from her, take a step forward, slowly but forcefully place the sharp tip of her heel on James’ big toe on his left loafer, and begin pressing down, while she carefully explains that his unwanted advances are a thing of the past, and she will continue to work there and get the shifts she needs, because if she doesn’t there will be a lawsuit and neither James nor the hotel want nor can afford that, now can they? And James’ eyes seem to flicker back into their own blue again as he winces and they get a little wet with tears, and he nods and leaves the desk, and she lets go of the breath it feels she’s been holding for an eternity and stands a little taller, and lets herself revert back to I, back to first-person, her shoulders still straight as when she was she.

*

But fuck if that new Jessica didn’t crumble though, didn’t she?—because here I am, back to Miss Demure, Miss Reticence, et cetera. Here I am, the summer after James’ bullshit, after another round of applications and the brief high of a few acceptances, followed by the low of no funding, thinking myself worthless, but trying to keep my head up, not knowing how much longer I can stick around at my parents’ house, how much longer I can last at this lackluster job, but not wanting to abandon my grandparents either—and why the hell isn’t Harvard Medical School big bro around to help out anyway?—sitting here almost in tears after work because of some bitter hag of a woman and her little comment, running the scene through my head over and over, a stupid inconsequential scene in the long run, but I can’t help it, can’t help it at all:

James nowhere to be seen as usual, and it’s been a busy weekend, lots of softball and baseball tournaments in town, with adolescents running the halls and noise complaints and short tempers all around, but I was managing to keep it together, put on a happy face, though a few

8 times I felt the corners of my mouth droop a bit, but then I hiked them right back up again, and the fucking woman pulled up outside. Her cheeks were flushed red, and I could tell she’d been in the car a long time and was irritated. I put on my brightest smile as she walked to the desk, greeted her warmly, registered her efficiently and, while the receipt was printing, asked if she was in town for the baseball tournaments. She said no, in fact she was here with her daughter who wanted to visit the campus because she might apply to the college next fall, using the term “state school” rather dismissively, and as she was signing her receipt, I said that I’d graduated from there myself and had a great experience, in fact it has one of the best Engineering and Agriculture Departments in the Pacific Northwest, and the English Department is up-and-coming as well. She looked me up and down, and I can’t help trying to picture what she saw: a mousy little girl in glasses, stuck behind a desk, a dead end job, doing nothing with her degree, wasting her life, probably can’t find a man, destined to be a cat lady, wheezing away on Medicare, taking taxpayer dollars to continue living a wasted life. “Can’t be that great a school then,” an eye-roll, not a second thought, just the diminished, gape-mouthed clerk with her “Jessica” tag on crooked in her wake as this woman turned and left. I had nothing to say. I stood and watched her exit the lobby and pull away in her car, until my brain finally quit stuttering and I realized what she’d said, what it implied about me, and wanted to rip her hair from her scalp. And when I got off work I sat here in my car, and it feels like longer, but I’m sure an hour or so has elapsed, me staring at nothing, torturing myself, working myself into a helpless ball of neurotic nothing.

*

What I should have done was this: I should have walked from behind the desk and caught up with her. I should have asked her politely to hold on a minute. I should have explained that I understood she’d probably been having a bad day and that can indeed be rough, but that her disparaging comment about me crossed the line, and it was unfair, seeing as how she doesn’t know me or the details of my life or any of the reasons that went into my decision to work here at this hotel fancy enough to have “Suites” in the name, despite my college degree, and that she

9 should instead enjoy her visit on campus and I could provide her with a helpful map and offer any assistance she or her daughter might need, and to wish her a lovely day. But I didn’t. What I did was stand there and take it, no third-person heroine stepped in, and since then I’ve been sitting here obsessing over my life like it’s a role I need to learn, like I’ve finally been cast in the lead but have no idea how to play it, going through it over and over, trying to find that one nugget, that one pearl that brings the whole thing together, that one piece of information that explains the character and her motivations perfectly for me, and so, damn, maybe I should seek therapy like Rachel says, and finally work through some of this shit, so that I finally will know how to play her, how to deliver her lines and position her body, how to feel about the world around me while I’m her, how to extrapolate from her to me, from her to me.

10 Invoice for Therapy Services

Valley Psychological Services, P.C. 1250 NW Harrison Blvd. Suite 100 Corvallis, OR 97330

Phone: (541) 758 – 1558 EIN#: 27-4624557 NPI#: 1487882264

Therapist: Katherine ICD9 Codes: Dufrense, Ph.D. 293.84, 296.3, 296.5

Client’s Name: Jessica Danger Service Description: Initial Evaluation, Cognitive Behavioral Invoice# 1 Therapy

Date of Invoice: September 1, 2010 Month Services Provided: August 2010

Service Detail

Date: Description Hours

Aug. 10, 2010 Initial Evaluation 1.0 Aug. 17, 2010 Session 1 1.0 Aug. 24, 2010 Session 2 1.0

Total Hours: 3.0 Hourly Rate: $35 TOTAL $: $105 Notes: client elected to discontinue services Aug. 27, 2010

11 Craigslist

Jessica, having the day off from the hotel, woke up late, and has been stalled at her desk, staring at her laptop almost continuously since she got out of bed. She originally intended to clean her room and do laundry. Go for a walk; water the plants on her window sill—the basil is starting to thrive after being on the brink for a couple of weeks there. The only thing she has managed so far, however, after turning on her laptop and going about her usual web-based routine, is a shower she hoped would clear her head, cleanse her inertia. The substrata of her hair are still slightly damp. This is what is currently on Jessica’s computer screen:

CL > corvallis > all personals > missed connections

Reply [email protected] flag[?] : miscategorized prohibited spam best of Posted: 2010-09-03, 1:23AM PST

Fred Meyer Produce Department – w4w – 24 (Albany)

We passed each other several times and caught each other’s glances more than once. I smiled at you and your lips twitched. You grabbed an artichoke, and I remember thinking that I’d never cooked an artichoke before. We kept running into each other all around the store. I told myself, the next time we happened into each other, I’d stop and introduce myself, but I made my deal too late, apparently, because I couldn’t find you after that. You’re cute; I like your glasses and reticence. My jeans had a tear under the, uh, left cheek area. I’m sure you would’ve noticed—if I read the situation correctly. If this finds you, contact me. Coffee? Tea? Drinks and a show?

 Location: Albany  it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Posting ID: 4073709266 Posted: 2010-09-03, 1:23AM PST email to a friend

Please report suspected exploitation of minors to the appropriate authorities

This page has been open on her browser for approximately one and a half hours—20 minutes of which were passed in the shower. The other open tabs include her Gmail inbox, a

12 webcomic1 her friend Rachel linked her to, and Facebook. Jessica stares at the screen pictured above for 2-10 minutes at a time, then navigates to the other tabs, leaving ghost images of the words “Coffee? Tea? Drinks and a show?” vibrating under her eyelids every time she blinks. Nothing new arrives in her inbox, but she checks it anyway; no new notifications from Facebook and nothing interesting in the news feed, but she checks it anyway. She is tired of flipping through page after page of the webcomic, but she reads three more. She feels that a single outside nudge might tip the scales, articulate her keystrokes. She’s struggling to nudge from inside. If she were to navigate back to the Craigslist homepage for “corvallis/albany,” the subheadings under “personals” would appear as follows:

strictly platonic women seek women [sic] women seeking men men seeking women men seeking men misc romance casual encounters 2 missed connections rants and raves

She has never created or replied to a personal ad on Craigslist. She sometimes touches herself through the athletic shorts she sleeps in to raunchy posts under “casual encounters,” especially when they are correctly capitalized and punctuated, narrative in structure, and involve non-rape or -incest oriented, non-workplace role-play. She is particularly fond of imagining someone taking her by the hand, self-assured, but eyebrows asking permission, and then leading her back to this other woman’s place. Or a married woman thing, even though she’s been

1 This is called “DogHouseDiaries” or “Doghouse Diaries”—Jessica isn’t sure of the preferred stylistic rendering. The title appears on the site itself as “DOGHOUSEDIARIES,” but the all-caps/no-spaces thing freaks her out, and she refused, in the G-chat conversation in which Rachel recommended it, to refer to it as such, much to Rachel’s amusement. The comic Jessica is on at the moment is http://thedoghousediaries.com/485. She feels a punch to the face might do her good. Also, a cookie. On the whole, she feels the comic’s author gets her.

2 “casual encounters” is further subdivided into sections based on gender and sexual preference: w4m, m4m, m4w, w4w, t4m, m4t, mw4mw, mw4w, mw4m, w4mw, m4mw, w4ww, m4mm, ww4w, mm4m, m4ww, w4mm, t4mw, mw4t, in which w = woman, m = man, and t = transsexual (coloration accurate to how these subcategories appear on her screen, though, to be fair, she only clicked on ww4w once, mostly by mistake). It took Jessica several weeks to figure out what the various iterations and combinations of letters joined by the number 4 actually represent, a fact she finds embarrassing. It is something she has never admitted to Cindy, and doesn’t think she ever will. 13 brought up to believe that’s immoral. She also generally avoids posts with lewd photos. She’d rather let the words function in and of themselves. These posts are few and far between, however, and she has other diverting sites bookmarked for when she is in the mood but Craigslist lets her down3. The number of nude and semi-nude pictures people post of themselves (or “themselves”—one can never be too sure who’s whom in the digital realm, now can one?) on Craigslist astounds Jessica on a daily basis. She cannot count the number of penises she has seen via “casual encounters.” It probably numbers in the multiple-hundreds, edging up toward a thousand—possibly more. These pictures do relatively nothing for her—the head of the male member reminds her of Darth Vader, and the absurdity of this association sort of annoys and puzzles her, and sometimes makes her laugh. And, too, the blatant penis flopped out for the world to see seems unartful and un-clever, lacking in any intriguing mystery. She has learned to avoid “m4w” listings, both because of the rampant phalluses and the sheer number of posts to slog through4, most of which are incredibly crass and uninteresting, and full of spelling errors, a significant number of which appear to be unintentional and, to Jessica’s mind, rather pathetic and nauseating. The post in “m4w” that convinced her to never visit that subset again (“never” being for about a month or so) was as follows:

HELP.. PLEASE. – m4w – 38 (albany) i hav a rockhard boner and i dont want aneone to see it!!! can i hide it inside of u???? no overweight ladies (that mean more than 20 lbs over). only YOUNG girls. daddy fan2sy a plus ;) 5

3 Well, she really only relies on one other site. It is a collection of user-submitted erotica, including a section (her preferred) devoted to audio-only submissions, containing both oral interpretations of erotic narratives, and also people engaging in microphoned sexual activity, alone or with a partner, and usually accompanied by “dirty talk” of some variety, often hackneyed and more annoying than cloying, but what are you going to do?

4 Even in the relatively small metro area of Corvallis/Albany, OR (towns of ≈ 55k and 51k residents, respectively), the number of “m4w” casual encounters posts range from 50-100 per diem. She once visited the equivalent page for Cincinnati, OH, where Rachel’s living for grad school, and (on a weekday) she clicked through 3 pages at 100 posts per page before she found the start of the previous day’s offerings midway through page 4.

5A slightly abbreviated list of things Jessica found disturbing/disgusting about this post in no particular order: the man’s age in conjunction with internet-speak, half-cocked ellipsis, terrible joke, non-internet-speak spelling errors, weight-shaming, intimations of pedophilia/incest, and use of all-caps. Also, the picture of the poster’s erect penis cradled in his hairy hand. She’s come to accept, if not approve of, smiley/winky faces in general, but no way in hell in this particular case. 14 In “w4w”, the number of vaginas she has seen are fewer than the number of “m4w” penises, but still rather numerous (probably also in the hundreds). She finds herself surprised by the number of pictures of toys protruding from vaginas. There are also pictures of breasts and thong-clad buttocks. Roughly a third of the women who include a picture of themselves (or “themselves”) with their post are at least semi-clothed, with the important bits tastefully covered. And then also, sometimes the included picture is of a cartoonish toadstool sheltering a contemplative frog from a downpour, or some other rather whimsical yet innocuous and nonsexual thing. She finds herself drawn to these more conceptual pictures, though not the overly sappy ones (she did not even click on the post with a red rose on a white satin pillow). This is not to say that the “w4w” posts are not also terrible, of course. A few examples of titles Jessica skipped over without a second thought, beyond the occasional depressed wonderment at the state of humanity, are “Pegnant BBW NO SKINNIES!”, “show me ur pussy….”, and “only BIG boobs.” She sometimes wonders what the response-rate is for this type of post, as opposed to that of the more earnest, less explicit posts, though she’s sure she would find the answer disheartening. There’s also something rather sad about the “casual encounters” subheading in general that she can’t get over, even though she finds herself drawn to it fairly frequently. She often wishes she could wrap her mind around one-night stands and indulge in them herself, seeing them often enough in episodes of television dramas and sitcoms, usually free of dire consequences and portrayed as rather the normal state of things. But she can’t, and so she tells herself that half of the posts in “casual encounters” are fake anyway, and the other half are too risky, really, because of all the things she learned in high school health class6, televised dramas notwithstanding. So it would be foolhardy to respond, she convinces herself. Despite the twist in her gut making her ache for someone to wrap his or her arms around her, making her click through a few more posts. Also making things difficult and discouraging are the occasional red herring “w4w” posts, like the following: “Gd lkng fun male challenges you all to a friendly pussy eating

6 Also, before one is able to proceed to any of the various “personals” pages, one must first pass a disclaimer page, and, down at the bottom, there’s a helpful little note that plants a subconscious worm in Jessica’s brain: “Choosing safer sex greatly reduces the risk of contracting STDs including HIV.” Even though the overall message isn’t phrased negatively, the capitalized acronyms are the most visually striking, and have pretty much exclusively negative connotations.

15 contest”7. Jessica simply cannot fathom the thought-process (or lack thereof) behind posts like these. The posts she hovers on and circles back to, on the other hand, are more along the lines of “Coffee?? Cuddles???” (she really likes the extra question mark on “Cuddles”). She fantasizes about responding to these, especially outside the dodgier realm of “casual encounters”, but none of them, no matter how typo- or nudie-pic-free, have nudged her into action. She thinks this is probably pretty pathetic, and her continued inaction produces subsequent self-loathing, and she ends up crying into her pillow at odd times of the day. This clearly does not keep her from looking, however. A chart of the frequency with which Jessica visits the various “personals” categories, shown below as the average number of days per week each individual category is visited at least once, would go something like this (see figure on the next page):

7 The full text of this particular post, which she could not help herself from reading, curiosity outweighing her sense of indignation, was as follows:

Hi, I would like to challenge all thin/thick (not obese, sorry) hygenically conscious women (and any other female you think can compete) to a pussy n ass eating contest, I am VERY talented, patient, sensuous (good, deep, wet, thorough, queening included, I WILL make you squirt uncontrollably, wetter the better) and drama free,,,I know it sounds ridiculous but it sounds like a hell of a good time to me, no recip needed at all, and no losers!! I'm good looking 43 m, nice body, not hairy, good hygiene, no facial hair, laid back Scorpio, let me know if you're interested, let the (real hunger) games begin

Jessica’s audible response was a resounding and un-ironic “WTF”—as in, she said “double-you tee eff” out loud— as she copied and pasted the message into an email addressed to Rachel and Hugh, typing “And you think I need therapy?” Adding Hugh to the list of recipients had been pure muscle memory on Jessica’s part, and Rachel later IM-ed her, saying Jessica should let sleeping dogs lie (and really should go back to that therapist), but neither of them ever knew what effect the receipt of this email had on him now that he and Jessica were no longer roommates and Rachel was half a continent away in Ohio. Hugh notoriously holds his cards pretty close to his chest, unless one can see him face to face, in which case his facial hue gives him away rather obviously. Jessica secretly guessed his face went rosy with embarrassment, due to the unfortunate “I love you” incident and the subsequent moving apart thing, both physically and emotionally. The thing that really stumps her about that post above is what exactly a “pussy n ass eating contest” is to this dude. It also took her a while to make any sense out of “recip.” She has no idea what “queening” is, and is not curious enough to investigate. 16 Average days visited per week 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

She’s eased off on the “men seeking women” personals, because a lot of them devolve into weird moralizing and frustration8, or are just kind of pathetic (she realizes she’s probably in no place to judge, but she can’t help it, and Rachel’s pop-psychology theory is that this is a defense mechanism that kicks in whenever Jessica thinks something might possibly actually go right). There are very few “women seek women” [sic] posts, often fewer than 10 per month. Most of her efforts are focused on “missed connections”—finding posts there to be the most hypothetically successful in her extrapolative day dreams—and so she searches for herself there daily, sometimes finding herself even where she clearly is not.9 At this moment, still in front of the screen, knowing she is being ridiculous and desperately trying to convince her idle fingers resting on the computer keys of that fact, Jessica is having a fictitious conversation with Rachel in her head. Since Rachel started grad school in Ohio, she’s been too busy to talk on the phone as much as either of them would like or are used

8 e.g. here are some representative titles: “Why is it so hard to find someone HONEST?” and “Countrty Boy and Great Morals Seeks Same in His Girl”

9 Once, for a solid half hour, she was convinced someone’s post was directed at her, despite the fact that she rarely wears a ponytail and doesn’t even know where the Albany Wal-Mart is, but, you know, maybe the person meant Safeway or something and his subconscious hiccupped as he was composing the thing. He included a picture of just part of his face and one eye, hazel, and quite piercing.

17 to, and these imagined conversations Jessica moderates are becoming increasingly more frequent, following an almost exponential curve, albeit unsustainably so10.

Rachel: “So, what’s the hang-up? I mean, whatever, I know and you know what it is. But why don’t you speak it aloud.” Jessica: “I know, I know, fuck you. Because I’m a quivering ball of neuroses and won’t seek therapy. Because my mind immediately goes to all the hypothetical things that could go wrong, always defensive, always playing it safe. Because I have no real romantic self-esteem whatsoever, and find it hard to believe this girl’s post is even directed at me—cute? she likes my glasses? And because I can barely even tell my best friend about being interested in women in the first place11, even though you’re like the only person I talk to.” Rachel: “Yeah, what the hell’s that about anyway? What, you don’t think I can take it? I should totally tell you to fuck off right now instead of trying to help you. Call you four-eyes or something clever.” Jessica: “Probably.” Rachel: “Oh Jesus, quit with the pity party. Here’s what you should do: see the situation for what it is. There are no stakes. You’re not risking anything, besides possibly getting ignored, which won’t happen. You know she’s talking about you—that twitch-lipped smile is dead on. Anyone with eyes can see she’s into you, just from the wording—that exquisitely vulnerable ‘uh’ near the end? right? And the part about the artichoke—oh my god, swoonsville. Even just thinking about it has to make your fun parts squirm.” Jessica: “Gross.” Rachel: “Whatever, tell me it’s not true. Hit reply, ya coward. Be your adorably awkward self. It’ll be fine—great even. And then, once everything goes swimmingly, you better actually tell me about this next time we talk in real life, outside this overworked, torturous brain of yours.

10 This is another thing Jessica would probably discuss with her therapist, if she was able to justify the continued expense of seeing her. As it stands now, however, a sliding scale only slides so far, and she finds her relative poverty a pretty convenient excuse, really.

11 The only mention of a woman she was interested in Jessica ever made in conversation with Rachel was a nostalgic mention of Georgia Powers, forward on their high school soccer team, while they were waiting at a late-night Taco Bell drive-through, because Georgia used to work at that very Taco Bell, and Rachel’s smile was a little too knowing for Jessica’s taste, Jessica herself still being rather unsure of her footing in these matters, so she refrained from any further mention. 18 It’s not like you’re super covert, and I’m a big girl. I can take it. By the way, don’t forget to boil that artichoke, if ya know what I mean.” Jessica: “I don’t think that even works as a double-entendre, dude.” Rachel: “Just ‘cause you didn’t think of it. Jesus, just hit reply already, Jez12. Quit stalling.”

Here are the things that convince Jessica, finally, to hit reply, from most compelling to least:

1) This person sought her out; saw Jessica at Fred Meyer, noticed her, and then posted to Craigslist at 1:23 AM hoping Jessica would see it and get back to her.

2) She does indeed remember the tear in the jeans, right where buttock met thigh, the edges frayed, white strands dangling. She averted her eyes when the girl bent over the avocados, searching for a ripe one, but it took all her self-control, and she was, if she’s being honest, straining pretty hard at her periphery. That’s when she picked out the artichoke.

3) She’s never felt cultured for boiling artichokes before, and the thought of this girl—forward and attractive girl—glancing over at Jessica to see her picking up an artichoke, as she’s bent over the avocado display, posed not unlike a pin-up or something, makes her lips twitch toward a smile involuntarily—no small feat.

4) Capitalization, spelling, that semi-colon, the string of interrogative fragments, mix of grammatical correctitude and playfulness of tone.

5) Jessica’s not insubstantial loneliness.

12 This is Rachel’s nickname for Jessica whenever she (Rachel) is frustrated with her (Jessica). It’s derived from “Jezebel,” with its negative and somewhat comedic (given Jessica’s upsettingly paltry romantic history) Biblical connotations, and the similarity between “Jez” and “Jess”—despite the fact that Jessica never has gone by “Jess,” at least not up to this point, because in middle school, she was one of two Jessicas, and the other one went by Jess. Not to mention her creepy hotel manager’s late penchant for constantly using “Jess” and “princess” in the same sentence when addressing her. Cindy, of course, will pretty much exclusively call her “Jess,” but that is unrelated to Rachel’s “Jez.” 19

*

Later, Jessica won’t even remember what the exact content of her reply actually was, just that she futzed with the wording for almost a full hour before she finally caved and sent it, and signed it “Jess” on a whim. She sends it at 1:23 PM on purpose, once she sees that it’s already 1:20 and realizes she’s working the thing to death anyway. Once she sends it, of course, she re- reads it a few more times, thinking of slight alterations to various turns of phrase, before finally shutting her computer, starting a load of laundry, and going for that walk. There’s an email waiting in her inbox when she gets back.13

13 In the email, received at 3:34, she learns the girl’s name is Cindy, and she’s nannying a bit but otherwise unemployed, living with her father in this mobile home park in Albany. She says she’s a little frayed at the edges, but would love to chat, text, whatever, meet up sometime. She includes her phone number. They text message each other all day, and the next day as well: Jessica sends a selfie at work; Cindy responds with one of her own—head bent forward, single arched eyebrow, gazing over glasses Jessica will later find out are for aesthetic purposes only, with a mischievous close-lipped non-smile digging a dimple in her left cheek. This is what cracks something open in Jessica’s chest, and she invites Cindy for a drink at a bar far from the hotel bar, once she’s free of the front desk. Later, they each think of this as their first date. 20 Some Things That Make Us—Us

Beauty in Someone Else’s Sorrow

We were scrabbling up a gravel path from the river or stream or rill not far from Cindy’s father’s trailer or double-wide or mobile home—we were never sure which terms applied where. We’d been skinny dipping in the before-dawn stillness, where the water widened into a pool, Cindy’s hand lazily tracing my shoulders. The path got steepest right before it reached the highway, so that it almost felt like we and the ground were rising in parallel lines. We were side by side, holding hands, our free hands at the gravel for balance, and when our heads broke the plane of the blacktop, we could see the sky fading steadily from black to dark blue beyond the bridge, the Pacific willow and black cottonwood trees lining the river becoming silhouettes. Birds beginning their noise. When our feet reached the cement of the sidewalk to cross back over the bridge to town proper, Cindy stopped me with a hand on my arm. I turned back into her, stepping so that my leg fell between her legs and put my lips to her neck, but she nudged my face away with her chin and pointing silently to the other side of the bridge, to the halfway point. There was a human silhouette melded with the railing, and as Cindy dropped her arm, it brushed my breasts, covered only in flimsy cotton, and the combination sent shivers. We couldn’t tell if the figure was on this side of the railing or the other, and it was swaying forward and back. It looked like a man, poised to jump, debating the issue silently. We stood and watched; he swayed. Nothing changed for a while; we didn’t know how to change it. Then we heard a sob, softened in the twilit air. He pitched forward, Cindy gasped and took a step; I felt my body lean with her motion, maintaining our closeness. But the man thought better of it, and, just before the point of no return, again reached behind him and grabbed the railing. He swung a leg over and maybe saw us: a movement, a shift in the shadows, or maybe a glint off Cindy’s nose stud. He stopped and stared, straddling the barrier between up and down. We were holding our breath; I squeezed Cindy’s hand. We left him like that, unsure what else to do, furtively taking the long way back to town, avoiding the bridge. 21 When we had left the man behind, I said, “Will you not try to—to do it beautifully?” “What?” “It’s from Hedda Gabler. Ibsen. In the end, she kills herself beautifully.” “Your plays.” “Yes.” I thought the beauty of the scene outmatched the tragedy; Cindy edged the other way. In the moment, she had stepped forward, I had only leaned, and I loved her for that step. But we both agreed there was beauty to it—that pre-dawn moment of indecision, black silhouettes against bluing sky—and it stayed with us for a long time.

Uncertain See-Saw

I decided I wanted to take Cindy to the Albany Civic Theater, a little play called “At First Sight,” get out of the apartment for a while. We were naked, Cindy with her head on my stomach, stroking my thigh, and I asked if she wanted to go. She hadn’t been able to eat that night, the room smelling of ginger tea, and I hadn’t been able to cum, Cindy’s hand shaky from the effort. No one had taken her to a play before. We passed a fish-and-chips place I didn’t know existed, and she said she’d always loved fish and chips. “I’ll take you. If you’re feeling okay, maybe after?” “Maybe.” She reached across to the back of my neck, staring out of her window. It started raining. “Soon,” I said. The woman behind the glass looked at our clasped hands, and her face didn’t change, but her eyebrows gave a small twitch. I paid and smiled; Cindy looked hard at her. Handing the change through the slot, she fumbled, and two quarters rolled across the floor behind us. Cindy grinned and I wanted to kiss her, but instead I shifted closer. We left the quarters to the janitorial staff.

22 The play was cloying, the actors earnest. Cindy held my hand in hers all through the first act until my arm fell asleep, and I closed my eyes, rested my head on her shoulder, and let my arm stay asleep. I wanted to lift my mouth to her lips in the dark of the scene changes, but each time, the lights came back up before I had shifted my head from her shoulder. Afterward, outside again, she said it was like a see-saw, head lifting and settling all through the play. “I knew what you were thinking,” she said. “My little uncertain see-saw.” “How poetic. You could write lyrics.” “Oh, hush.” I kissed her under a street light. When we drove past, the fish-and-chips place was closed, the neon sign extinguished.

A Night on the Town

Cindy called the desk at the hotel: “Phoenix Inn Suites, this is Jessica. How can I help you?” “Jess, can you ditch?” Her voice was shaky. “Always.” I waved James over as he slunk past and said I was leaving early. Cindy was outside her father’s place when I pulled up. I got out of the car and hugged her. Her hair smelled like lavender. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Stop.” “My dad—.” “Cindy, it’s fine. I love you, remember?” She held my hand as we drove, and I shifted with my left. The hospital was back in Corvallis, ten miles away, sun glinting off water collected in ditches beside the road. “It’ll be fine,” I said. “Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.” “Do you have any water?” 23 “You can’t, remember? Not ‘til after.” “My throat is so dry.” “I’m so sorry; it’ll be okay, I swear.” I squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry I didn’t take the day off in the first place,” and she lifted our hands to her lips. I stayed with her in the waiting room until the nurse led her through a door with a narrow chicken-wired window, her hand pulling away from my fingertips just before the door closed, eyes on mine. I watched until they passed through a second door. In the waiting room, I Googled “endoscopy” from my phone. Risks include Perforation (tear in the gut wall), Reaction to sedation, Infection, Bleeding, Pancreatitis as a result of ERCP. I Googled “ERCP,” but couldn’t process the words on the screen. I felt my eyes begin to water and put my phone away. I spent the two hours trying to figure out the color of the walls. I started with beige, then ecru, tan bored me, then puzzled over eggshell—the color of eggs being rather a relative thing. When Cindy returned, her eyes were dull from sedation. I asked the nurse if they’d found anything. She said she couldn’t discuss it, her voice affectless. “They didn’t,” Cindy said, leaning into me. “They can’t figure out what’s wrong.” I took her to a place we went when we first met, an old house converted to a restaurant called Nearly Normal’s. Cindy picked at her falafel. “You know what would go well with this?” she asked. “All that booze the nurse said I couldn’t drink.” We laughed and took most of our meal with us.

Domestic

Cindy was yelling at me. “Where the fuck were you? I called like a million times and straight to voicemail every goddamn time, with that disgustingly fake greeting—Hi! You’ve reached Jessica!—like anyone who knows you believes that syrupy bullshit voice!”

24 Her imitation of the message was perfect, raising the hairs on my arm. She’d told me she’d been a singer in high school, and I could hear her singer’s gift for intonation. I was on the verge of tears, staring at my feet. “Cindy.” I could almost feel the name fizzle in front of me. “After, like, the third missed call in as many minutes, wouldn’t you think something was wrong? Wouldn’t you be curious? Wouldn’t you stop what you were doing and wonder?” “Cindy.” “Jesus Christ! I could’ve been kidnapped, or dying, or being attacked! I was stranded! And you couldn’t even pick up your goddamn phone, thumb up your—.” “Cindy! I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I can’t say it enough. Listen, I love you, and I’m sorry.” I was crying; I shrank from her, slumping into the couch. “I can’t deal with you right now.” She’d stopped yelling, and the softness in her voice ripped or tore or cut. “I’ll stay at my dad’s tonight.” She left, not even taking her toothbrush. I sat on the couch with my head in my hands. I was supposed to Skype with Rachel—her high times and heady days at the University of Cincinnati in grad school. Hear about her trip to some conference or other in Louisville. I’d told her there was a Cindy, but hadn’t given details. A Cindy who lived with her dad, but had seemed to be living with me recently. A Cindy who wasn’t here tonight. A Cindy I wished I could talk to and explain and not say the wrong things, always the wrong things. I heard the computer chiming from the bedroom, Skype’s jaunty ring, and it sounded like Cindy’s imitation of me—saccharine, fictitious. I stayed on the couch as it chimed twice more, then fell silent. I stayed on the couch all night. Later, I did explain things, but not until much later. Grandpa falling and in the hospital, and Grandma saying she couldn’t take care of him and crying into my shoulder, and the phone on silent in my pocket all day. And even then, I apologized. Cindy hugged me and apologized, too. Then she pushed me backwards onto the bed. I bounced slightly on the bedsprings and laughed.

Second Person Plural 25

My grandma called while Cindy and I were in the shower and left a message asking if I wanted to come over and help her sort through old letters. I told Cindy, and her eyes sparkled under the bathroom lights: “Can we both go? Your grandparents sound wonderful.” Grandma and Grandpa had moved to an assisted living facility a half hour away, and their lives were still partly boxed up in the living room. The drive went quickly, and part of me wished it wouldn’t; I’d told Grandma I was bringing a friend, Cindy listening in while getting dressed and her smile faltered a little before she hiked it back up. I shifted gears uneasily, and the ride was rougher than usual. “Grandma, this is Cindy, my best friend,” I said, trying to say what I meant, what I wanted to mean, after I hugged her at the door. They shook hands, but then Grandma pulled Cindy into her for a hug as well, and our grins all tried to outmatch each other as she ushered us inside. Grandpa was in his chair watching the TV and he looked mildly concerned at the interruption. “He’s having one of his bad days,” Grandma said. Grandma and I sorted through a box of old letters on the floor in the living room, and Cindy sat with Grandpa, asking him about the neighbors, the people they sit with during mealtimes, the characters in the police procedural he was watching, until he seemed to forget she was a stranger. Grandma and I paused and listened. “What’s-their-names, the couple across the way, he’s got a cane and she’s got one of them scooters, with an orange flag. Well they always sit across from us at supper, and he gets the chicken if they’re serving chicken, which they usually are, and then they complain about it together, too chewy or cold or too hot or the breading is too thick, and she’s not even eating it.” Cindy was laughing and nodding: “I know people just like that. Some people seem to need to complain to stay alive.” After an hour or so, we were finished, Grandpa was dozing, and Cindy and I were helping Grandma put some boxes in the closet.

26 “Thank you for coming,” Grandma said when we were ready to leave, and I felt that Cindy and I were a single unit, second person plural, and Grandma hugged us both, so that Cindy and I were scrunched together.

Viral

We weren’t talking, because I’d said some spiteful and hurtful things. And then I came down with the norovirus that was going around, and was puking and shitting, sometimes simultaneously. Cindy brought a trashcan into the bathroom where I was slumped, pants and granny panties around my ankles, braving the stench. She mopped up the vomit already on the tile floor. “I’m like that motherfucker Jesus. I’ll use my hair to clean your feet when I run out of towels. Or shit, was that Magdalene?” Even in my pathetic state I laughed. “Oh god, you’re gonna make me puke again.” “That’s fine. I’ve got pretty long hair.” “Is this what it feels like, when you feel sick?” She stopped with the towel, leaving it sopping near the tub. “Well, the vomiting part. It’s not usually so,” she gestured at me hunched on the toilet, “all-encompassing.” She stood and her knees cracked. “But yeah, I think it comes close.” “I’m sorry.” She put her hands to my cheeks and kissed the top of my head. “I haven’t washed my hair in days.” “I can tell,” she said, and kissed my hair again. “I promise to wash it and douse it in oils and perfumes, and use it to clean those feet of yours. You know, whenever this thing passes.” “Deal.” Later that night, after I had nothing left to void, she cradled me on the couch. We watched Hamlet, the Richard Burton version. Cindy was dozing, face in the crook between my neck and shoulder, arms under my breasts. 27 “Some people knock this version,” I said. “Mmm.” “But I think it works. Burton’s slight detachment feels good right now.” “You just want to fuck him,” Cindy said, half asleep. “Well, yeah.” She jerked a knee into my thigh. “Just because you’re sick and I’m babying you doesn’t mean I won’t kick your ass.” “Just checking, Cin, just checking. Making sure you’re still with us.” “Aren’t you supposed to be deathly ill?” She swiveled us so that she was straddling me, without putting undue pressure on my GI tract. “Stop being sick.” She leaned down and kissed me. “I’ll get us some ice-cream.”

Us

It was almost dawn, the birds nesting under the eaves beginning, beginning, beginning. We hadn’t slept. “I have to,” Cindy said. “I know.” I was cradling her, speaking into her hair, nose full of lavender. “My mom needs the help with the kids. And she thinks the doctors out there can help.” “I know. I want you to get better. I want you to be able to see your Mom and the kids.” I squeezed her. “I want to come with you.” “Not so tight.” “Sorry.” Her mother lived in Tallahassee. There was a second husband and their three kids. There were dogs, six of them, various sizes and breeds and temperaments. “You can come visit.” “I will. I’ll eat PB&J and rice and beans. I’ll take out a loan.” “Stop.” “I will.” She sighed. 28 “Do you feel okay? Right now?” I asked. “Yes. Except for the sad.” I shifted, swiveling us so that I was straddling her. “You’re not leaving ‘til late tomorrow?” “Not ‘til afternoon-evening.” “Good.” I kissed her and lifted her shirt and kissed her stomach. When the sun had fully risen, I made coffee for me and ginger tea for Cindy. I scrambled eggs with onion and bell pepper and zucchini—our favorite: hot sauce on mine, nutritional yeast on hers. We ate and drank awkwardly, not letting each other go. “It might be temporary,” Cindy said. “Mom’s made inquiries. The doctors she’s talked to are optimistic.” “That’s good.” We stopped eating, and I was crying, and Cindy reached for my tears. “We’ll be fine, right?” I asked. “We’ll be fine?” “Of course,” she said. “Of course we’ll be fine. We’ll never stop being an us.”

29 Subject: RE: recent account activity From: [email protected] To: [email protected]

Dear jdanger89,

This message is to inform you that a person you know, or knew, has now dropped out of YourLife™. You were close once, like genitalia close if your messaged correspondence is to be believed, but if you check your profile, she is gone. No more status updates you’ll want to read hungrily but will instead pretend to ignore. We know how it goes. Seeing those alien status updates—the whole generally-seeming-happy-without-you thing, the pictures with other people, wondering who might be making out with whom, the lack of yourself in these glimpses of her life—can be rough. You kept her in your friend list, we assume, just to be unhealthily nostalgic, hoping to accrue her “likes” as proof she still thinks about you occasionally, sometimes being unable to stop yourself from creeping on those pictures and wishing yourself into them, because you couldn’t get her out of your mind, couldn’t stop being consumed by her. (We noticed and were saddened at the relationship status progression from “In a Relationship” to “In an Open Relationship” to “It’s Complicated” to “Single.”)

And, we know, it’s sometimes just nice to have an easily quantifiable number of friendships, and to be able to count formerly important people in your life among them, despite current conflicting realities. We get it. But just so you know, you are now at [YourFriendList] - 1.

We at YourLife.net want you to be aware, in case it matters to you. We presume it would, but it’s been hard to tell from your online presence. We notice you’ve been keeping a low profile. We hope this means that you’re over her, but we suspect that you are not. Perhaps you have developed sufficient coping mechanisms around food, masturbation, and liquor to not need YourLife™ anymore, and this part saddens us.

Please come back to us; bring YourLife™ back into your life in a meaningful way. Don’t let this news dissuade you. We’re here for you, in times of trouble as always, and we miss you.

All the best,

YourLife™ Team

30 Sirens

Jessica wakes to sirens again. The ceiling is cracked above her head. The siren-wail, already receding, reminds her of the insistent nightmares that would wake her as a girl but then fade from memory, leaving rapid heartbeats and shallow breaths and the vague impression of some sort of screech—her own, a floorboard, perhaps a shadowed creature. The hairs of her forearms bristling. This was in her childhood house, her parents and brother asleep down the hall in their respective rooms. Their rooms bedrooms, her room an afterthought of a converted office. Her eyes would snap open to the map of France tacked to the A-frame slant of her ceiling. She’d wake again all night, many nights, eyes half-lidded in class or church or her grandparents’ house the next day. Alone in her new apartment, hairs bristling, she thinks this is the third emergency vehicle of the night, the third in what seems like quick succession. She wonders what is happening, but can’t focus her thoughts. She closes her eyes, rolls from one hip to the other, face almost touching the wall, and eventually, slowly, returns to sleep, to dreams she won’t remember, leaving their psychosomatic remnants.

*

When she wakes again, there is faint dawn light in the window, and her cellphone is flashing new messages. She ignores the phone and opens her computer, thinking to look for news of last night’s sirens, but falls into a pit of status updates from Rachel, feeling vicariously alive through her friend’s day-to-day. After she’s shut down her laptop, she remembers what she meant to look up and wonders if she dreamed the sirens. Her head aches and she knows, sirens or no, that she will suffer last night’s restlessness all day.

*

A few nights before, she had received a call from Cindy while at work. She thinks of herself as Jessica until Cindy calls; then it’s Jess. The hotel was dead, so she took the call on her 31 cell. She still has Cindy’s picture in there, the one from their initial text-messaged exchange, before they’d even met. The picture—Cindy’s arched eyebrow, prescription-less lenses, dimpled cheek—came up on the screen as the phone buzzed. It hurt somewhere hard to define to see her face; every time it hurt a little more or a little less, an ever-changing thing. That smile in Cindy’s eyes but not her lips. Cindy calls out of the blue every month or so. They broke up over a year ago now. Cindy’s now with a guy named Buck, of all things. She’s not happy. Jess is with no one. This is the way with them, their well-worn ruts: parallel, overgrown but still palpable, like the remains of the Oregon Trail she saw with her grandparents way out in Eastern Oregon one summer. Her grandma kneeling with her to run their hands over the sunken earth, then her grandpa checking them over for ticks. When Jess answered the phone, Cindy told her how she and Buck went to the lake and flew kites. They ate cheese and crackers by this lake out in north Florida, Lake Ella. “We had Brie and cheap Cabernet, just like that time on the coast. You remember.” There was no question mark. Jess did not need a question mark. She closed her eyes and let Cindy’s words do what they would.

*

Jess had been there once, Lake Ella in Tallahassee. It’s small, and there’s a paved path around it, wider near the lake-front businesses, tapering as it moves away, fading to narrow root- cracked asphalt in places. There’s a wide swath of grass on one side where scantily clad beautiful people lounge, and a paved jetty-like thing with a gazebo at the end, jutting out into the lake. There’s a café and a farmers’ market every Saturday. Jess and Cindy had watched a drum circle from a bench. They watched non-native ducks fucking each other (“raping” is the word Cindy used, and Jess shuddered, because, no, consent was not part of it, but she hid in “fucking”). There were signs posted saying not to feed the non-native ducks, with pictures for identification. Cindy called them “invasive Freddy Kruger fucks,” because of this ugly, weird red shit glomming all over their faces. Jess remembers thinking it was the perfect description. She’d never seen A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it didn’t matter. There was nothing better than Cindy’s descriptions. 32 Jess and Cindy were on this bench, watching people stroll around the paths, watching the drum circle. They held hands and didn’t say much, watching this expression of improbable Floridian subculture bang on home-made percussion instruments, Jess swaying to the beat. When they spoke, they disagreed. Cindy thought the drummers were free, enviable, riding whims. Jess thought they were an illusion of freedom, like their freedom trapped them in itself, making it impossible for them to do anything but whatever they wanted. What about the important things people didn’t want to do, but needed to do? What about sacrifice, responsibility? Cindy said it wasn’t like that at all, and the conversation devolved. She took her hand from Jess’s and held her stomach. “I think I’m gonna puke,” she said. “Your doctors piss me off,” Jess said. There was nothing more to say, and they left.

*

After Cindy fell silent on the other end of the line, Jess asked if she’d just called to tell her about Buck and Brie and kites and hand-holding. When Cindy was still silent, Jess said something about that taking inordinate skill, the whole flying kites one-handed thing. And how had they managed to bring wine and cheese-robed crackers to their mouths? Was it with their kite hands, or did they unclasp their hold of one another, however briefly, to eat their dainty little meal? Cindy called Jess an ass. “As always, you miss the point,” she said. “I don’t think there is a point. I don’t know why you call.” Cindy didn’t respond. Wherever she was, it was windy, and the air blustered against the phone’s mic. Maybe she’s right, Jess thought, I miss a whole lot, all the time. She waited a minute, and then hung up. This is how their conversations go. The problem, in Jess’s mind at least, was and is that they’re still in love with each other. And because of that, she thought, replacing her phone on the desk, they’re a little half-human.

33 *

When she checks her phone, after putting coffee on and slumping into a dining room chair, Jessica sees a missed call from Cindy, one from her brother in Boston, a third from the hotel (1 AM, no voicemail—Jessica’s eyebrows arch). There’s also an email, from James at work, time-stamped 1:34 AM. She swipes away the missed calls and, frowning, opens the email. There was a fire. The hotel burned down; it is ashes and charred timber and blackened steel, and she’s out of work for the foreseeable future. No casualties beyond minor smoke inhalation, the email notes. Jessica looks at the message, brow slack, not moving until the kettle whistles, making her start, and the phone slips from her fingers, the screen cracking on the kitchen tile.

*

Two calls from Cindy in a week feels ominous; Jess picks her phone from the floor and places it, screen down, on the table. She walks through streaks of morning light from the improvised kitchen curtain, down the dark hallway, and into her room. She pulls the battered venetians and returns to bed. The gaps in the blinds, where slats are bent or cracked, leave flecks of light along the wall.

*

Yesterday, at the café down the street, Jessica flirted with a barista she’d seen often enough, but never engaged. Cindy’s call and visions of Buck were still ringing in her mind, even after a couple days. When she ordered her drink, she smiled and leaned in over the counter to peer at the chalk menu over the barista’s head. She smelled lavender shampoo and patchouli, marveling at face-to-face interaction. Unbidden, she remembered: Cindy’s hair was always lavender, and she felt her nerve slip. Jess blinked, willed herself back to Jessica, and let her eyes rest on the nametag above Tracy’s left breast. It was crooked, and she felt she might fall in love with a crooked name tag. She asked what Tracy’s favorite drink was, and ordered it—hazelnut mocha, hazelnuts from just 34 down the road—Tracy said she had a cousin who worked the farm. She deliberately brushed her hand against Tracy’s when she got change. Tracy’s eyes got real squinty when she smiled. Jessica thought of the café as an island, a place apart, a place she could imagine herself different, a person who wasn’t floundering, a person who flirted with baristas and maybe, eventually, took them home. She also imagined the table where she sat—in the corner, with her back to the wall, facing the door—as an island within an island. A layered existence, with some essential Jessica at its core. Or perhaps like one of those pictures of a painter painting a picture. She pulled out a book for show, casting glances at Tracy, at the door, at the other patrons. There was a dude done up in plaid and skinny jeans and thick-rimmed glasses typing things on a laptop, and Jessica rolled her eyes. She pictured him in an overlarge waxed moustache. His keys, clipped to his belt loop, clanked against the chair when he shifted. He also cast glances at the counter. She caught herself looking for signs, like she’d done in high school. If she glances this way and smiles while making pretty-little-thing’s latte, it means something. And when Tracy didn’t, the “Thanks!” loopily lettered on the back of her receipt became heavy with innuendo. After a while, Jessica realized she was again doing things because of Cindy, or the lack of Cindy—putting on a show, seeing things that weren’t there, or probably weren’t there, acting out a part for an audience a continent away. She got up, glanced at the counter where skinny jeans was getting a refill. Tracy leaned around him, smiled, and waved to Jessica where she hovered at the door. As she left, a doubtful, hopeful smile itched at the corners of Jessica’s mouth.

*

The little irregular stipples of light are in different places when Jessica wakes again. Her headache is less. She remembers her phone is in the kitchen, and thinks she may have heard it go off mid-slumber, sending its song through her subconscious state. She imagines her phone is flashing again and decides to ignore it and its cracked screen. Without work she feels unsure of what to do. She thinks of trying to go for a run for once, or straightening her room or scouring the sparse dishes from last night’s pasta. Her mind wraps itself in coils so that soon she is thinking about the condition of her running-shoe laces and how they seem like moldy spaghetti 35 strands, and then to the way Tracy’s spaghetti strap fell off her shoulder, and how clear it was that there was rarely a strap beneath it, the fall of her thin top, the nametag tugging one side slightly lower, the smile when their hands brushed each other. And why hadn’t Jessica tried to talk to her before she left, to get behind that smile, and see what movements and thought-scapes were hidden there? She recognizes Cindy in the thought, harping at her simple, lust-bent mind. Spaghetti straps rather than Tracy’s favorite books. Bra-less contours instead of Tracy’s aspirations. Cindy introduced her to Edward Gorey and Cormac McCarthy. Cindy wanted to start a massage therapy practice in a small town that could use it and would come to appreciate it. What does Jessica even know of Tracy? Her cousin harvests hazelnuts.

*

The last three months they were together, Jess and Cindy were apart: Jess back in Oregon, at the same job, in the same town, and Cindy in Tallahassee, seeing a specialist for her stomach problems and taking care of her mom’s kids. They talked often until they didn’t, and Jess made the flight out twice before her savings sputtered, and even when she made it out, Cindy was distracted or sick or taking one or other of her half-siblings to soccer practice. They hadn’t had sex either time. When Cindy suddenly decided to drive back west that time, after another battery of negative tests, after another fight with her mom and another tantrum from the kids about eating vegetables, her car made it an hour before it collapsed in on itself, didn’t even make it out of the state. Later, on the phone for the first time in weeks, Cindy told Jess a new friend, Sam, drove out and picked her up. Jess wanted to ask about Sam—man or woman? and what does “friend” mean? and why is this the first mention? and who drives an hour each way at the drop of a hat?—but she didn’t, trying to hold on to the sounds of her syllables, the image of Cindy flashing on her screen whenever she called.

*

36 After Jessica finally retrieves her phone from the kitchen, she thinks to call her brother, but he doesn’t answer. She calls the man who’s technically her boss at his home. James tells her there’s nothing to be done; something about a clause in the contract. No severance, no chance of reopening anytime soon, if at all. Just blackened rubble on an unsalable lot. He sounds slightly smug on the phone, but Jessica assumes she’s just projecting—James is out of the job, too, after all. But perhaps, for James, any fall for Jessica is a lift for him—that threatening-sexual- harassment-charges incident outweighing any of his own misfortune. Jessica wouldn’t put it past him.

*

When Jessica was little, and even into her late teens, she used to lie awake in bed and fantasize about getting shot in some lonely, heroic way. She practiced the way she would land, carefully splaying her arms and legs to seem haphazard, forming a peacefully pained expression as her death-mask. Rather her “near-death-mask.” She always imagined pulling through, waking in a hospital, battered but on the mend. She usually pretended she was saving the boys in her class from some unknown assailant. Then it was the entire class—first humanities then history then chemistry—after she heard about Columbine. She tackled boys with trench coats and guns nightly, saving the innocents and saving the troubled boys from themselves. Then, in ninth grade, she began saving Georgia Powers from being raped by a masked man, playing the leading role she never did in the school theater productions. She jumped on his back and clawed at his eye-holes and choked him even though he flopped backward on top of her and her breath was gone. Sometimes her parents would knock on the door, asking if everything was alright, because her bed springs would sing through the house as she fought her way into a love story. Her brother in the next room over would pound the wall with his fist. As she fell asleep, Jessica imagined bouquets too big for her little bedside tray, and daily hospital visitors—especially Georgia Powers, hanging back after her parents had moved to the elevator. A smile with swimming eyes and a touch light as silk on her bare arm. The piteous

37 wonder of it. The freedom from responsibility or agency. Just sit back, and let her fall in love with you, she’d think.

*

The third call of the week, Cindy’s face distorted in the fractured screen as the phone rumbles and chirps on the table, and Cindy leaves a message. “Call me. You need to.” It’s so simple and self-assured, Jess can’t help but feel its pull all throughout the day. She cleans two dishes and picks up the clothes on the floor. Cindy’s voice and whole ghost-images of Cindy waltz around the small apartment. Several times, Jess picks up her phone, looks at the cracked screen, and then puts it back on her bedside table.

*

The last time Jess really remembers hearing sirens, the memory that comes to her mind every time a siren wails in a movie or television program, was before Cindy moved to Florida, when the ambulance arrived at Jess’s apartment to take Cindy to the emergency room after two nights of puking up everything she ate. Jess had called in a panic, Cindy slumped over the toilet. She had chased the lights and wail in her car, running two red lights to keep pace. She thought if anything ever happened to Cindy, she’d collapse and never get up again.

*

As the sun fades to shadows, she begins to settle into a rhythm. She walks to the table, picks up her phone, brings up Cindy’s face, the crack scarring the right side of her, and Jess’ thumb hovers over the silly green telephone. Then she gets wrapped up in a critique of the phone symbol, depicting an outmoded, endangered species handset—a handset this slimmer, more powerful and useful device in her hand has replaced. She can’t figure out what she really thinks about the matter, or why she gives a shit, and she walks back to her chair, opens her book and reads the same page over and over. Rinse; repeat. 38

*

The night before, as she lay in bed trying to fall asleep, she fantasized of a life unfettered in which she could do as she pleased—no Grandma with bills, no parents to worry over her, no job, no money troubles. In her fantasy, she called Cindy and said, “Leave Buck; I’m coming.” Cindy said, “What?” and Jess repeated, “Leave Buck; I’m coming.” She didn’t know how to finish the scenario, so she just repeated it, trying out different tones in her head, even speaking the words out loud once, and her voice cracked, and she got up to get water. Back in bed, she held her pillow close to her, wrapping her arms around it, curling into a ball and wrapping her legs around it, clinging to it like salvation, like floating debris after a shipwreck.

*

She again walks to her phone, stares at Cindy’s eyes for a minute, then brings up her brother’s face, and touches the little telephone. “Hey, Sis.” His voice sounds tired. “What’s up?” Jessica says she’s just returning his call. She saw he’d called and is calling him back. “Oh, right, yeah. Sorry about that. A bit of a butt dial.” Jessica closes her eyes and nods, and then, remembering herself, she vocalizes: “Oh, okay.” “Yeah, sorry. But hey, how’re things? You doing okay? You sound weird.” “Nothing, no it’s fine. I just thought your call meant something. I was reading meaning onto it.” “It can mean something. The butt can be a perceptive part of the body.” “Is that what they taught you in med school?” “Among other things.” Jessica smiles. “Aaron?” She can’t remember the last time she actually spoke his name aloud. “What do they teach you about loneliness?” There’s a long pause. 39 “Nothing, really. The workload makes you feel loneliness, but I think they assume you’ll figure it out on your own. Listen, Jessica, are you alright? Boy trouble? I don’t know if I can help on that score, but I can listen.” “No, it’s fine, I’m fine.” Jessica slumps against the wall. “Do you have a someone?” Another pause. “I did. It didn’t really work.” “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I don’t call more.” “Me, too. I’m sorry it took a fortuitous butt dial. Shit, Jessica, I have to go, but call soon, okay? Or I will? We’ll talk for real?” “Sure.”

*

She sits on the couch and reads the same page, this time squinting and only reading every other word. “…beauty…face…maiden…equaled…” It has a sense to it, she thinks, and twists the words to her will: face equaled maiden beauty. Maiden equaled face beauty. Choose your own adventure, she thinks.

*

There are no sirens that evening. This feels symbolic of something.

*

For months after they broke up, Jessica went out only for work and groceries. She smiled her required smile at the front desk, and her throat hurt from the forced inflections. It was three months exactly, they hadn’t spoken in that time, and she lay in her bed halfway through a bottle of wine, making the crack in the ceiling squirm as she blinked and squinted and focused in and out. Her phone called out Cindy’s ring—she still hadn’t changed it from their shared song—and Jess knocked her glass to the floor reaching for it. Cindy’s face was staring at her, and she sat up quick, and her head swam. 40 She answered, and Cindy said, “Jess. You still want me.” Jess nodded and picked up her empty glass. Her sock-clad foot soaked up wine from the carpet and purpled. Jess poured more wine. “Remember the picture of you trapped in my phone?” she asked. “The one that says hello every time you call? It’s winking at me.” “You’re drunk and you can’t get over me.” “It looks like—in that picture—it looks like you were trying to put on a serious face, but your eyes are still smiling. Your eyebrow is upside-down smiling.” “You should be moving on, you know.” Jess nodded. “I bet your hair’s longer,” she said.

*

She decides, finally, to go to sleep. She decides not to fantasize about anything but falling asleep and sleeping through the night.

*

Jess wrote down the last conversation she had with Cindy before they broke up, in a tattered spiral notebook. She had jotted it down the minute they hung up, as she did sometimes, imagining scenes in a play that ends in marriage. After they broke up, she wrote it again, copying from the previous page; then the next day, on the next page. This continued to the point that even Jess-sans-therapy knew it wasn’t healthy, pages filling up. And she wrote it a last time, mixing cursive and print where convenient: “How are you feeling?” She remembered her inflections, the tremor, but she doesn’t know how to capture it on the page. “The medication seems to be working a little. I feel a little better, I think. But, Jess, listen. The thing is, it’ll take time, and I don’t have any money, and my mom’s starting to rely on me, and when I’m not here the kids eat Mac n’ Cheese and nothing else. I can’t come back yet.” “Okay.” “It’s not okay. I don’t think I can come back at all.” Jess tried to speak Cindy’s voice as she wrote but got it all wrong. She tried again, and failed. She gave up, and wrote: 41 “No, stop saying things. Can I just listen to you breathe?” She no longer knew how much of the conversation was actual memory and how much she’d filled in with close approximation.

*

Jessica wakes when it’s still dark out and doesn’t fall back asleep. She flicks on the bedside lamp and opens her book and reads a sentence three times. She thinks of Tracy and how many names end in “y,” and then Lake Ella and drum circle punks. The café Tracy works at opens at seven. Jessica sometimes sees Tracy there early. She has enough money in her account right now to drive cross-country, sleeping in truck stops. Her lease is up in a couple months, a breach might not be too expensive. If she asked, Aaron could maybe send money to Grandma. Last she heard, he’s making decent enough money and paying down med school quickly. Her phone’s little light is flashing. Tie me to the mast, she thinks.

*

Several months before she left, Cindy and Jess talked about pooling their funds to get to France. They’d both thought of France as a promised land as girls, though neither could say why exactly. Something about the language, something guttural or earthy in certain syllables. Something beautifully off-kilter in the syntax. Cindy did the math. They could get there with a little left over and figure it out from there. Jess said they wouldn’t last more than a week before they were broke and stranded. And what if Cindy got sick? “Does it matter if no one can even figure out what the fuck’s wrong?” Cindy said. That night, they went to bed angry.

*

The sky is just beginning to lighten as Jessica walks down the street to the café. She has an idea about what she will do, and about what she should do, but she’s convinced it all depends 42 on signs and symbols, and the idea seems to shudder from moment to moment. She pauses outside the door, puts a hand on her phone in her pocket and the other on the handle. In a minute, she’ll peer inside through the glass. Or maybe she’ll turn around. Tracy being there could be a sign. She could let her in, love theater, have answers, be a whole human who could teach Jessica to be a whole human. The missed calls could be a sign, the constant tug and pull of Cindy at the periphery of every day. She could call her and find out. The way she said “Jess” when she answered would tell her. The clouds and their shapes or lack of shapes could be a sign. If, somewhere in town, an emergency vehicle were to hit the siren, sending its echoes through the dawn stillness, that could be a sign, though a sign of what is hard to say. Signs are overwhelming, she thinks. She hovers. She wavers. Interpretation is key.

43 Hand-Gun: A Performance Piece

by Jessica Danger

This is a piece of fiction, involving someone who’s not me, this young woman Jessica. I feel like I should make that clear. Perhaps she seems a lot like me, and maybe looks like me, and even has the same name as me, but for our purposes, I am simply a body—consciousness shoved aside—playing her, inhabiting her, acting her to life. Reification, word become flesh. Sorry, that was maybe a bit much? I might cut that bit. Sorry. Uh, so what you need to do, for me, please, is pretend my actions are hers, not mine. And remember that this is fiction. That’s important. Here we go. Okay, she is alone, Jessica, in a room, her room, sitting cross-legged on her bed. Something like this. [sits cross-legged on stage] Only, on a bed though, pretend the floor here is bed. And as she’s sitting there, she takes her hand… [enacts following gestures while narrating] …and folds her right pinkie- and ring fingers into her palm, lifts her thumb. Brings pointer and middle fingers together to form the barrel. She prefers the two-fingered barrel over the single. [flips between the two] It feels more gun-like. All of her knowledge and perceptions of guns come from TV and movies; she’s never held one or seen one first-hand. She looks at her weaponized hand. She holds it in her lap, cradles it with her other hand. This makes it seem more real. She rarely does this sober. There’s a half-flask of whiskey on the desk by her bed. [removes flask from pocket, sloshes liquid for audience, and places it on floor] Pretend this part of the floor is a desk. [waves left hand over part of the floor, circular motions, stops] 44 The other half of the flask is swimming in her veins. She takes the gun, hefts it rather, and puts it to her temple… [places fingers to temple] …the right side, aiming through her skull just over her ear, see? [turns head to left, presenting right side to audience] She saw it this way on TV, in movies. [removes “barrel” from temple, but keeps gun form and gestures occasionally at audience as she continues] Something she saw once said this isn’t the best method for the desired result; like, it’s been known to fail or something. She doesn’t remember where she heard this, but it seems like a good chunk of her brain is in the line of fire, so she thinks she’s okay. She’s also seen the whole gun in the mouth thing… [places fingers in mouth, slurring around them] …but she doesn’t like the feel of her fingers… [removes fingers] …so un-gun-like and fleshy, tasting of hints of whatever she made for lunch or dinner; she never eats breakfast. [speaks as an aside, noticeably so] Today’s fingers are garlic-y, really garlic-y, or maybe I’m just making that up, because my fingers are garlic-y, and like, I might be projecting that onto this other fictional person in this fictional scenario. [back to performance] But, the thing is, she’s also pretty sure she wouldn’t like the metallic taste of a real gun, because everyone knows blood tastes metallic, and she doesn’t like the taste of blood, she’s tasted it enough to know. So she holds the gun to her temple like this… [fingers to temple again, then moves gun-hand out toward audience for demonstration] …and if you’ll notice, the middle finger extends farther than the pointer, which seems pretty gun-accurate. A finger could be a barrel after all; it has barrel-like qualities. Especially with nails bitten down. And like, Bruce Willis used a highlighter to approximate a gun in

45 Bandits, he and Billy Bob holding up their first bank. It convinced the elderly bank guard. And a finger is also highlighter-like. And semi-automatic pistols, or non-revolving ones—I’m not 100% on the terminology here, nor is she, Jessica—but anyway, non-revolvers have the barrel and then also that rectangular piece people pull back dramatically before entering gun-brawls. The thumb, of course, is gratuitous, but you can’t do that dramatic pull-back-the-rectangular-bit with a gun- hand, so the thumb hammer replaces it for dramatic effect, and when it fires, the hammer falls… [drops thumb] …no one said anything’s ever perfect. So, gun to head… [fingers to temple] …she takes a few deep breaths. [takes deep breaths] She tells herself that halfway through her next inhalation, she’ll drop her thumb; the imagined bullet will travel into her brain, killing her. It’ll exit the left side… [illustrates how bullet would exit with left hand] …and the bits of skull will make the exit wound a lot bigger than the entry. And she’ll pretend she’ll really be dead, irrevocably. There won’t be any Tobias Wolff “Bullet in the Brain” time distension. No, like, defining memory will play before her eyes, giving you or her or me new insight into her character. It’ll be an instant, just like any other instant. Like a light switch turning off, or some other obvious simile. She inhales… [inhales] …and before her lungs are full, she drops her thumb… [drops thumb] …and she doesn’t mimic the sound of a gun firing, because she’s dead: the invisible bullet has left the barrel, propelled her head to the side… [tilts head to left] …and she gives up all control of her body. [flops to side, attempting bonelessness, speaks from this position] 46 Her gun falls, becomes a hand with half-curled fingers; her body flops back on her bed, canted to the left. Head lolling, mouth slightly open, eyes closed. Maybe her eyes should be open, but it’s too late to second guess. It feels like she’s pulling a muscle running down the right side of her back, the way she’s lying. Her hip bone is butting her ribcage on the left. Her legs stay crossed, but her right knee is higher by an inch or so. She stays quiet—something I’m unable to mimic for obvious reasons—tries to breathe as shallowly as possible, as infrequently as possible. Eyes stay closed. If she were dead, she wouldn’t feel the unnatural contortions. She tells herself she can’t care about the discomfort, because she’s dead. There would be blood and brain bits on the wall, pretend there’s a wall here. [motions to imaginary wall with left hand, still lying flopped over, otherwise motionless] She’s seen that a bunch of times. CSI and a super brief scene in Snatch are two examples that come to mind. She wonders what someone would say or do when they found her. Or like, what if she never moved again, and they found her just like this? They might think it was the perfect crime, the murder weapon transformed into a hand in death. The detectives would be stumped, the case filed away as a classic whodunit, resurrected on those unsolved mysteries shows. Although, really, if people found her like this, it’d probably mean a white room with padded walls, is probably what you’re all thinking, right? Straight jacket time. [pauses a few beats] Well, eventually, slowly, Jessica sits back up… [moves to upright position again, cross-legged, etc.] …takes another swig from the flask… [takes swig] …and makes the gun reappear. [re-forms hand-gun] Pistols she’s seen in movies often hold ten rounds. She’s counted. She’s not sure if that’s standard, but it doesn’t really matter. So that leaves nine. Round two. [drops thumb, flops over, as before]

[Lights out, curtain, whatever] 47 Hugh Speaks

Every once in a while, she sends me these texts. These texts that scare me. Or maybe that’s too strong a word, maybe “worry” is what I’m going for. I mean, nothing overt, right? But suggestive. I worry. And it’s not every time, sometimes it’s just something innocuous: a funny sign she saw, something she read about the future of independent booksellers because Rachel’s told her I got a job at Powell’s, or seeing a dog that looks like Gus, shit like that. But sometimes the text is something fatalistic, something troubling. I feel like I can sense them, just before I flip my phone open. I don’t know if I actually can or if it’s just something I project into the past after the fact. Ideation is the term for it, I think. It’s been a while since Intro to Psych, but I remember that being the term, and my therapist has used the word when gauging my own symptoms and all that. Jessica seems to be ideating a lot, and it sometimes worries me, sometimes angers me. Well, no, she’s not doing it a lot. A few times a month maybe—if that. One or two times maybe. But, okay, for instance, I got a text earlier this week about how she’d kind of, sort of, but not really, taken too many pills. Pills that her girlfriend left before leaving. Or I guess I should say her now-ex-girlfriend. Before the breakup. For stomach issues, or something. Left them by accident I take it, in the confusion of the move, or maybe intentionally, as a sort of piece of her for Jessica to latch onto, something to tug Jessica’s mind toward her in her absence. But then they broke up, and the pills are there with altered overtones. It’s probably pretty obvious, but I don’t have very positive feelings toward this Cindy person or her pills, and it’s probably, if I’m being honest here, for mostly selfish reasons. I remember Jessica saying vague things about stomach issues, but being an invalid doesn’t excuse manipulatively leaving behind pills, you know? But maybe I’m just projecting that onto her, because of my own history with Jessica and the way we left things. But so in this text she sent she said that okay, technically she might have overdosed, in its most general and innocent definition, without “dark narcotic undertones.” She was feeling “loopy,” and ended saying she was going to bed. She had been feeling nauseous. The label on the bottle was torn. She was unsure at times how many she actually took: “maybe there were a couple more canny bastards in there.” 48 That’s how it goes, all these texts in quick succession, so that if I start responding to one, I get like two words in, and then the phone buzzes again in my hand, and I delete it, go back, and check the new message. I should learn to just wait. Like with popcorn on the stove: you know to remove the pan from the burner once there’s enough time between pops. But anyway, that’s just one example of the type of thing I’m talking about. One time she was telling me about this blind hill just outside of Corvallis, going over the top, and you can’t see shit, it’s like jumping off a cliff into water, there could be anything on the other side, waiting to crash into. Shit like that. So like, what would you think? Not overt, but a little troubling, right? But then with this last one about the pills, there’s the fact that these were coherent sentences. With no real grammatical or spelling errors—so when I read them, I was worried, but also found reasons not to freak out and call the police or some hotline, you know. I don’t really know who you’re supposed to call in that situation. I might’ve called Rachel, even though she’s halfway across the country, but she’s Jessica’s best friend, she’d have a better idea of what to do than I would. I sometimes wonder if she gets texts like these or if Jessica saves them for me only. I don’t think she means to fuck with me, probably doesn’t even realize it does fuck with me. She just doesn’t think it through. It’s tough, when you’re in a bad place, I know that. It’s tough to put yourself in others’ shoes when yours are so fucked up. These last texts about the pills coincided with a fairly well-adjusted spell for me, when the clouds seemed to part. Jessica would probably hate that metaphor. I wonder if she thinks about my moods, how I’m doing, whether or not I have a stash of pills on hand. But always with these texts, they’re so damn grammatically correct. She had the correct “It’s.” The syntax, the commas. I mean, right? She used the word “canny” for Christ’s sake. And I’m not worried about a few missing letters for brevity. Sometimes people do that, Jessica less so than others maybe, but still. It’s normal. And she’d usually put an apostrophe in “‘Night,” but the lack of a single apostrophe doesn’t seem indicative of a body in crisis. Do dying people text in coherent sentences? How dexterous is a thumb on death’s door? You know that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail? When they’re in the cave and reading what some poor bastard chiseled on the wall, and it trails off into a death-moan? Yeah, it’s like that. There’s a level of absurdity to it. This wasn’t anywhere near that. More like a scene from

49 one of her plays or something. A rehearsal. Which has its own dark implications I don’t want to delve into. I rarely respond to her innocuous texts, but with the ones that set me worrying, I can’t help myself. I know I can’t get too deep into it without hurting. I know that it’s unhealthy, but I can’t stop myself. I keep telling myself it’s not fair, I don’t deserve this. She didn’t want to be with me, that’s fine. Well, no, it sucked, and I’m still fucked up over her. I tell myself to keep my distance. I try. I have my own contexts and everything, after all, other demands, other worries and piling on someone else’s is not something I need. I sometimes make it an hour or so, or even a sleepless night, without responding, but it’s like a drug. Eventually, I have to get my next fix. But sometimes, and it’s becoming more and more lately, I distinctly do not worry when I get a text like that. Like this time. Sometimes I don’t worry, because it angers me so much that she does this, and I pitch my phone into a couch cushion too hard, and it rebounds to some far corner of the room where I just leave it until the morning, or whenever I can bring myself to pick it back up. Once it even flipped open midflight, like some dancer doing a little kick or something. Sturdy little phone, all things considered, which is good. God damn that girl has always known how to get me. Or maybe hasn’t known, but just has an unconscious knack for it. Or maybe I just have an unsolvable, unrequited love for her that will never go away. At least not while I still get these texts. I mean Jesus! And plus, am I that person she’d reach out to in that final moment? I kind of doubt it. Our relationship has always been lopsided, with my love going way deeper than hers. But to me, it feels like a test maybe, or like she’s poking me with a stick. I didn’t ask for these texts. But then again, I answer them, which I suppose is implicit encouragement. But has she asked about me? It’s either depressed texts or cryptic drunk texts about her impressions of the crack in her ceiling, and then there was that email way the fuck before Cindy with a Craigslist Casual Encounters post. After we hadn’t spoken in like a month. After I’d told her I loved her and our entire friendship fell apart. Like, what the hell? Out of the blue like that, the implications of Jessica trolling Craigslist personals hovering in the wings. It’s bullshit is what that is. Self- absorbed bullshit. How many times has she reached out to me in a genuine way, asking after my goddamn well-being? But you know what? No. Fuck her, fuck Jessica Danger. As if I’m just sitting around, waiting to hear from her, waiting to worry over her, nothing more on my plate than the desire to 50 help her through her little crises, like I can help her through a breakup without all these old feelings bubbling to the surface, and then I’m a wreck for days, I have enough trouble sleeping as it is, and it’s like I have this knot in my stomach and I just know I’m on the cusp of fucking ulcers. I can’t even deal; just thinking about it makes me want to puke. She should send one of Cindy’s pills this way. And then sometimes I don’t hear from her at all for a while. This last series of texts came after almost a month of nothing. Sometimes that feels worse than getting the text messages. Because then I miss her. It’s infuriating. Like I said, she’s like a drug, and I keep relapsing. My therapist the other day asked me what it would take to get me to let go of that friendship. To let go and break off contact. To get clean. She asked me what I get out of it, why I’m clinging so hard. And the truth is, I don’t know. Somewhere in my muddled little head I probably have to know, but I haven’t been able to bring it to the surface yet. But I do recognize that it’s not good for me, clinging this way. I’ve at least come to see that. It’s not totally my fault, not totally her fault, but it’s not good. I think I’m finally coming around to seeing that something needs to change. Last week, my therapist brought up something called DEAR MAN. It’s an acronym. D for Describe, E for Express, A for Assert, R for Reinforce, et cetera. I forget the last three, but you get the idea. It’s a part of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, something someone developed as a way to get what you want in healthy, open way, a way of opening up dialogue, but also a way to assert yourself, which is something I’ve always struggled to do. I struggle with it a lot, and I get steam rolled all the time, and I’m finally starting to see that it’s not a good thing, finally beginning to stick up for myself and my feelings once in a while. So, I’m supposed to write out a DEAR MAN for Jessica for my therapist next week, about what I want from our friendship, how I feel about how things have been and how I want them to be in the future. Which right now, I think I want it to end. Shit. I guess that’s true. Wow. Yeah, I guess I think it’s necessary, at this point, I think I can’t take this anymore, I think if I don’t do something, I’ll fucking lose it and do something crazy and nobody—not me, not my therapist, not Rachel, and not Jessica—wants that. Now the thing is how to work up the courage to say any of this to her.

51 “The Depressed Person”

Jessica is sitting in her living room, book in hand, crying. It’s hot outside. The box fan sitting in the open window isn’t plugged in, but it rotates slowly in the warm breeze. Someone looking on might think she should maybe remove the fan from the sill, close the window, and plug the fan in, to avoid any more incursion of the heat outside and help circulate the static interior air. If someone were in the room with her, they might be on the cusp of heat exhaustion, and be praying for Jessica to snap out of it and close the window and plug in the fan. But perhaps the relatively simple act of moving from the couch feels too impossible to even comprehend to her, sitting there, silently crying, shoulders shaking gently. Sweat beads and rolls down her face, joining the tear tracks on her cheeks. One would think it’d be rather discomfiting and that she should maybe wipe her brow or eyes or both with a shoulder or the back of a hand; it’d probably be uncomfortable for anyone to sit there watching, but it appears to be out of the question. Maybe she doesn’t know where to start: sweat or tears, which self-produced saline solution would be more urgent, more deserving, and the inability to decide could be the cause of her paralysis. Outside, the lawn needs mowing, but the maintenance man sure as hell doesn’t seem to be budging from his cool basement-level hovel. No one in their right mind would go out in this heat, no matter their feelings of obligation or lack thereof. The grass is getting long and thick, bending in the breeze, going to seed. Dandelions everywhere, conspicuous in an otherwise well- groomed neighborhood. It’s clear the grass will not cut easily, those thick stalks lying down, thwarting the blade, then springing back up after the mower has passed over them, whenever this guy finally gets around to mowing that is. Anyone who’s mown lawns knows letting it get this tall is just making it harder on one. Jessica looks like a person who may have mown a lawn or two in her life, something indefinable about her shoulders. The futility of a long-unmown lawn might feel symbolic to Jessica, or to a casual observer of Jessica sitting in the apartment with her, sweating, as she sits there openly crying in her living room as she is, and whose sideways stature on the couch offers a clear view of the almost calf-length grass outside. Jessica finally wipes her eyes with perceivable effort, leaving her brow to bead and drip. She now, finally, seems annoyed at her tears—the set of her face: jaw clenched, brow furrowed. 52 Her eyes leak again, and she paws at them with clumsy, frustrated swipes. Anyone watching might find it a relief. The couch she’s sitting on is positioned with its back to the open window, and she’s set herself sideways, bare feet on the synthetic knit of the cushion, slightly cooler than the high ambient temperature of the room, one would know, if one had placed a hand there, her knees bent, back bowed against the arm rest. She’s in running shorts and a white tank top. If she were out running, passers-by would catch a hint of pink sports bra through the fabric, but inside, the lighting’s such that it can’t really be distinguished. And anyway, she’s alone in this room, after all, and there’s really no one else here to take note. Earlier that afternoon, even, she masturbated half-heartedly on the couch in the same position, not worried about the window, no one out in this heat, and clearly no one in the apartment with her, masturbation usually being a pretty private thing, and she cried then, too. One would have had to have been pretty craftily and disturbingly voyeuristic or invisible or be Jessica herself to know this. The book in her hands is Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and she’s reading a story called “The Depressed Person,” something a perceptive observer could probably read quite a bit into. What with the crying and all, and depending on one’s familiarity or lack thereof with the arc of this particular story by David Foster Wallace, and with Jessica’s personal history and the recent events in her life. Her stomach makes an irreverent gurgle, and she half-laughs, half-sobs, like her stomach has spoken up at exactly the wrong time in the absolutely worst way, and there’s nothing else to be done but acknowledge the absurdity of its outburst. If this were a movie being shown in a theater, audience members might chuckle a bit, hoping to ease the uncomfortable silence and weight of this scene. Beside Jessica is a small wooden table with a mug of coffee gone cold— though can anything be truly called cold in this heat?—canted slightly on the edge of a thin cardboard coaster. The coaster says “Black Dog IPA.” Who knows where she found it—swiped from a bar, given to her by a friend, inherited from the previous tenant. She puts the book down. Winston Churchill referred to his depression as a black dog, a fairly commonly known little fact; it’s on his Wikipedia page. It’s hard to say whether this particular connotation has anything to do with the beer advertised on the coaster. There is not currently any beer in the apartment, one might have looked around hoping, but no, no Black Dog IPA or any other draught, neither in the mostly-bare fridge nor on the floor of the kitchen, which is sometimes where she leaves it, one who is familiar with her habits would know, bottles or cans sweating. 53 Jessica closes her eyes, and the pressure of her lids forces straggling tears down her cheeks. Her phone sits on the couch by her feet, and when she again opens her eyes, they stray to the phone and stick there. The book is open face down, resting on her stomach. If one were curious, and knew the pattern with which to move one’s finger over the unlock screen of Jessica’s phone, one would find the screen would jump immediately to the recent call list, instead of the home screen, and would find at the top of the list a three-hour call from yesterday, from someone named “Hugh,” an incoming call, arriving just before midnight, Pacific Daylight Time. In the fairly small apartment, the living room is also a dining room, and there’s a small wooden table, the surface dented and the finish chipped, and two mismatched chairs. On the table is a stack of three high school yearbooks, the top one open to a page near the middle. On the page, bottom left, there’s a picture of a younger version of Jessica in flowing white gown, belted with a tasseled rope, in stage makeup, garland on her head, between two other people, her arms draped over their shoulders. A girl in average high school civilian attire on her left, and a boy with glasses similarly nondescript on her right. The caption for the photo reads “After the Show, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” If one knew under which names to look in the index, one would be able to piece together that the girl at left is Rachel Ackerman, and is pictured on three other pages within the yearbook, in addition to this one and her class photo. The boy at right is Hugh Cole, pictured only twice in the yearbook: here, with Jessica (listed in the index as Jessica Daniels) and Rachel, and in his class picture. Jessica is pictured on three other pages besides this one, including her class photo. Reading significance onto the fact that the yearbooks are out and not tucked away in a box somewhere, and that this particular page with this photo is lying open, one might take a second look at the Hugh pictured there. Kind of dopey-looking, a face that doesn’t look like it needs to be shaved yet, kind of rounded and soft-looking, but like it might be handsome once it matures and hardens a little more. He is looking into the camera, but also seems poised to look into Jessica’s face beside him, his head leaning closer to hers than Rachel’s head on the other side is. Jessica’s head leaning ever so slightly more toward Rachel’s side than Hugh’s, maybe, or perhaps that is an optical illusion. These things can be open to interpretation, and observations are necessarily colored by the consciousness of the observer anyway. So it’s hard to say.

54 This story called “The Depressed Person,” one might be able to piece together, is about a clinically depressed person. It is 33 pages long, in this particular edition of Brief Interviews, and can be rather hard to get through in one sitting, depending on one’s attention span and state of mind. Also on the table with the yearbooks is an old Webster’s Dictionary, the paper dust jacket beginning to fall apart. Jessica has underlined passages and marked up the margins of the story with penciled definitions of some of the words. Words that are defined in the margins are boxed in pencil in the text itself. Passages Jessica apparently felt were significant or noteworthy are underlined. If a particular underlined passage seemed more important or significant than previous underlined passages, it would appear, she added a checkmark by it to set it apart. One might wonder about the consistency and decipherability of this system of annotation, the gauging of a passage’s importance being rather a relative thing and hard to accomplish with any degree of objectivity on a first read-through. One particular passage on the page the book is propped open to on her stomach is underlined with a double checkmark next to it, presumably making it even more important than one with a single checkmark. This passage involves late-night calls by the depressed person to the depressed person’s “Support System,” and, given the previous night’s late-night call from this Hugh, a person Jessica has her arm around in a yearbook photo, and given the length of that call, one could draw a number of inferences, and maybe begin to form a better picture of the goings on here. And of course there’s Jessica’s tear-streaked face. It appears for now, though, that Jessica’s tears have stopped. The book is still splayed on her stomach, open to the page of the story she was previously reading. Because “The Depressed Person” falls fairly early in the collection, the right side of the face-down book is much thicker than the left. Looking at it from Jessica’s position, the left side cover sports an upside-down suit- clad person with a bag over his head (one would assume the bagged person is a “he” from the title of the collection). If one is accomplished at reading inverted words, one could also see on the front cover that this book is “NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE.” The back cover on the right has three upside-down screen shots from this film adaptation. Jessica is staring into the couch arm opposite her, into the arm’s armpit where it meets the couch’s torso, just above where her phone and feet lie. She appears stuck in that position, lost in thought, and she doesn’t move, beyond the occasional blink, for several minutes on end. In actuality, this makes for rather dull viewing, if one were stuck there, watching.

55 And so, at this point, one might lose interest in the scene, Jessica picking the book back up and continuing to read, now dry-eyed. Especially if one has spent the better part of an afternoon with Jessica in this room, poking around a bit, invisibly flipping through yearbook photos and reading Wikipedia articles on Winston Churchill and generally being rather nosy and intrusive, but figuring one has inferred pretty much as much as one feels one could, given the data at one’s disposal, and yet, annoyingly, perhaps remaining, still, relatively unenlightened into the full complexities of the scene and Jessica’s character and current emotional state. One might feel pretty frustrated by this at this juncture, having pieced bits of puzzle together but seeming to be missing some key ones, being unable to enter Jessica’s mind and gain access to her thoughts as she sits there, relatively opaque and unforthcoming. And, in general, taking note that a person, now dry-eyed, reading a book on a couch is not the most thrilling thing in the world to watch, especially with a whole world out there, a whole universe. It is entirely reasonable to abandon the scene at this point, leaving Jessica to her pages. But if one were to leave now, one would also then miss the subsequent buzzing of the phone on the couch, and Jessica sitting up, tenting the book on her left knee, the phone screen, alight and jittery on the couch fabric, saying that a person named Rachel is calling, which would probably seem pretty significant to an observer who has been with this scene all afternoon, poking around, putting in all this time and effort to puzzle out the hidden meanings and connections, and said observer would miss Jessica answering the call and basically spilling her guts to Rachel about the previous night’s late-night call from Hugh, tears again making tracks down her (Jessica’s) recently dried cheeks, and telling her (Rachel) all about how she’s (Jessica is) reading this story by David Foster Wallace, and explaining and digging into the connection between this story about a depressed person and this conversation she had with Hugh last night, and going pretty in depth into their whole recent history, from those awkward final college years to the present moment, and Jessica’s own feelings about what Hugh and she talked about, and how she feels he’s totally justified but now she’s an emotional wreck and sees herself in an entirely new and disturbing light, especially having just now felt all these connections to this story she’s reading, et cetera, and even only catching one side of the conversation, arguably the more important side, one would be getting pretty well caught-up on and enlightened about the whole afternoon’s various tableaux, and if one were to miss that pretty significant and revelatory phone conversation, the curious observer, who might be pretty heavily invested in the scene by 56 this point, having spent so much time with it, having placed oneself in such awkward and socially unacceptable and voyeuristic positions in this room, feeling maybe one has overstepped several times in the course of this afternoon, and maybe even starting to feel the slow creep of that inner knowledge that one’s actions in looking on so shamelessly and intrusively are pretty out of the ordinary and maybe ever downright wrong and immoral, would probably feel pretty silly indeed, if one went through all that without this payoff, now wouldn’t one.

57 Happy Hour: Last Day/First Day

Fuck. This. Town. Fuck this goddamn town. I can’t take it anymore. I just drove past the civic theatre downtown and all I could think of was Cindy. I just had to drive past the trailer park where her dad used to live: fucking Cindy. Every place in this town I love, I took her, because you share the things you love with the people you love. Right. Fuck. I haven’t been back to Nearly Normal’s, because if I do, I’ll weep, and they have the best falafel. And then, driving down 99E, there was a shitty little gray Corsica in front of me, hogging the left lane and keeping pace with this semi in the right lane. They were going three under the speed limit, and I could feel my skin heating up every time we passed the posted speed. It’s right there, in black and white. Less than five miles till the turn off to the apartment and the shitty little bar across the street, where I’m jotting this bullshit down, but I was this close to just flipping a shit and driving off the bridge before I got here. You know, that bridge Cindy and I skinny dipped under and saw that guy looking like he was about to jump. Perfect. Poetic. I cannot take this anymore. I’m either pissed off or weeping or catatonic. I eat too much or not enough, I can’t write, I got kicked off the play I was in because I couldn’t keep it together in rehearsals. Ever. I’m in a bar half-sloshed at 4 P.M. because I still haven’t found a job, and my savings is dwindling. I gotta get out of here. I visited Rachel in Cincinnati not long ago. We ate at restaurants Cindy’s never been to, never heard of, we saw a play in a theater where I never held Cindy’s hand until my whole arm fell asleep. We went to this guy she’s seeing’s house and hung out on his porch, and I talked to people and actually felt like myself for a minute, like a mildly human animal. Even though it was awkward at times, like always. Even though everyone on the planet but Rachel and her boy toy is emotionally damaged and half-crazed. But I felt like I had some modicum of hope while I was there. For once. I know Grandma will be sad, my parents will be sad. I’ve stuck around for Grandma, for Grandpa, trying to help as much as possible. But there’s only so much I can do, and it’s getting less as Grandpa gets worse. It’ll be harder if I move, of course. But I won’t be any help if I step in front of a semi, either.

58 No, it’s a sign. When the hotel you work at burns down, it’s a sign. When you still can’t find a job a month—or shit, is it almost two?—later, that’s a sign too. When you can’t go anywhere in this town without lashing out or breaking down, it’s a sign. Time to leave. So fuck it. I’m going to do it. And you know what, I’m going to do it tomorrow. I’ll finish this beer, grab a few for the road, walk back across the street, pack some shit and box my books, drop them in the mail tomorrow, call Rachel, buy the plane ticket, say goodbye to everyone, get my parents to give me a ride to the airport, and get the hell out. Tomorrow’s my last day. Maybe the day after will be my last day. But my last day in this town is coming. I am out of here.

*

So, just got in. Yesterday. Rachel’s letting me crash on her couch ‘til I find a place, find a job, all that. There’s a Starbucks down the way that’s hiring. Rachel lives just across the street from this bar, and this place is pretty cool. Monday through Thursday drink specials for $2.50. Shows sometimes. Not unlike my place back in Oregon, only better because they rarely did live music. Here, it’s a weekly thing. I got here, and I decided to be a post-breakup stereotype—although, shit, it’s been forever since the actual break-up. But whatever, better late than never: hacked off most of my hair myself. It’s a little ragged, but I kinda like it that way. Feels right. It’s not perfect, I’m not fucking cured or whatever. I swore I saw a Cindy lookalike at the coffee house down the street. But it’s better. And the bartender working here is cute, in an unattainable bartender kind of way, but still. I can say she’s cute with minimal pangs and stomach twists. I smiled at people on my way over here, random people walking down the sidewalk. And most of them smiled back. It’s like I can breathe again. Or like, breathe fully, deeply again. Back in Oregon I could only get half-breaths, like there was a weight on my chest, or like that short-lived asthma scare when I was a girl and wouldn’t admit to having a cold. 59 Rachel’s got herself convinced that she’s going to help me set up a profile on an online dating site. She’s convinced I’ll be a queen around here. It’s bullshit, but maybe I can at least get a job sweeping the castle and rub elbows with the serving girls. Or serving boys. I feel like I can mix it up, try something new. I might be a little crazy, I feel a little unhinged, a little manic. But it’s better than how I felt before. I might be imagining things, but I think the guy who just walked in checked me out. Yeah, I think things will work out alright here.

60 OkJessica

jdanger89 26 / F / Bisexual / Single Cincinnati, OH

About:

My self-summary

I’m an empty essay… fill me out!

What I’m doing with my life

I’m an empty essay… fill me out!

I’m really good at

I’m an empty essay… fill me out!

The first things people usually notice about me

I’m an empty essay… fill me out!

Favorite books, movies, shows, music, and food

I’m an empty essay… fill me out!

61 The six things I could never do without

I’m an empty essay… fill me out!

I spend a lot of time thinking about

I’m an empty essay… fill me out!

On a typical Friday night I am

I’m an empty essay… fill me out!

The most private thing I’m willing to admit

I’m an empty essay… fill me out!

I’m looking for

 Guys and girls who like bi girls  Ages 20-40  Near me  Who are single  For new friends

You should message me if

I’m an empty essay… fill me out!

*

“Okay, I did it. You happy?” asks Jessica. “Who cares about me? This is for you. Are you happy?” “Well, obviously not.” 62 “This might help. I swear.” “Earlier you set it would help. Backpedaling like a motherfucker.” “Well, sorry. ‘Might’ is more accurate. I mean, it could be awful, that’s also a possibility.” “Jesus, Rachel.” “But it is good to give something a try, I stand by that. Doing something instead of weeping into your pillow.” “I don’t weep. Ugh, it feels gross already. Like, I can just picture a gaggle of salivating mostly-male pervs, held at bay only by the lack of picture to ogle.” “That’s the spirit. Okay, let me see.” “Look, it automatically presumes shit about me. It doesn’t know these things: ‘Drugs: Never’, ‘Speaks: English.’ Okay, sure, to be fair, to actually set up a profile, a person probably does need a working knowledge of English.” “Still weird. And it automatically set the age range, twenty to forty. Keeping our options open, I guess. And that you’re looking for ‘new friends.’ The drug thing’s pretty weird though.” “Oh hey, I got a message. From Alice.” “Ooo, Alice! Dramatic reading please.” “Sure, whatever. ‘Hi, I'm Alice. I work here at OkCupid. I think you'll find smarter, better people here than anywhere else.’ Ha, almost wish I had a beverage to spew in disbelief.” “Nah, c’mon, off to a good start. She thinks you’re smart.” “Be still my heart. Ugh, this is bullshit, I don’t even want to read the rest.” “Aw, Jez, stop, it’ll be fun.” “I’m pretty sure it won’t.” “You actually thought it was from a person.” “No.” “Like, a non-‘works for OkCupid’ human. You thought someone already messaged you.” “No.” “C’mon, keep reading. Or fill out a section—or I guess we’re calling them essays? Answer a ‘match question’—doesn’t that sound thrilling?” “I fucking signed up. Let’s call it a day.” “Coward.” 63 “I’m just an empty essay.” “Well, fill yourself out already.”

*

jdanger89 26 / F / Bisexual / Single Cincinnati, OH

About:

My self-summary

Hi. I’m Jessica, a recent transplant to Cincinnati from Oregon, trying to figure shit out. I’m kinda shy & quiet, more of an observer/listener than a doer/talker. Honestly, more into ladies than gents, but not really into absolutes either. I’m a complicated human, as humans tend to be.

What I’m doing with my life

Drifting, and reading books. Sometimes writing things. I care about language. Might try to get into the local theater scene, if such a thing exists.

I’m really good at background roles.

64

The first things people usually notice about me

Probably the unicorn I’m astride.

Favorite books, movies, shows, music, and food

Ibsen, Beckett, Uta Hagen, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Carver, Aristophanes, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, William Carlos Williams, Auden, others

Lost in Translation, others

Can’t think of many TV shows at the moment, don’t spend a whole lot of time watching

Rather un-hip in the music department, and usually require help from friends, but I’m into most of the stuff I hear; local stuff is cool

Vegetarian fare, Indian, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Thai

The six things I could never do without

Books with yellowed pages, pad and pen, strong tea, good food, good company

I spend a lot of time thinking about

How to keep my landlord from finding out about that illicit unicorn.

On a typical Friday night I am

Reading, probably, maybe scribbling nonsense, or out on the town in a bar or coffee shop, hunkered in a corner reading or scribbling or people watching, or staring off into space, or at home sprawled on the couch watching Netflix, or staring at taupe walls thinking of things to cover them with.

The most private thing I’m willing to admit

65 I clashed plaids once and was okay with it, despite the concern and goodwill of fashion- conscious individuals.

I’m looking for

 Guys and girls who like bi girls  Ages 22-32  Near me  Who are single  For new friends, long-term dating, short-term dating

You should message me if

You’ve read the profile above and find it interesting or amusing or otherwise comment- worthy :)

*

66

This chat is off the record Learn more Cancel

me: you get it? Sent at 5:27 PM on Monday Rachel: yup yup, checking it out now no picture? me: i mean, i could upload one… haven’t found one i really like yet it’s just… i’ve heard how weird ppl, esp. dudes, can be on here… i was just trying to keep things, ya know, textual Rachel: no, i get that but have you gotten any hits? without a picture, i mean? Sent at 5:36 PM on Monday me: nope. just good ole alice Rachel: well, i mean that might tell you something right there, no? i mean, right? Sent at 5:43 PM on Monday

*

Subject: Devon n unicorn n stuff From: [email protected] To: [email protected]

So, uh, sorry about not getting back to you last night. Things went… ahem, they went quite well. Devon made these vegetarian (or perhaps vegan?) seitan faux-wings in this 67 amazing BBQ sauce he whipped up, and then there were tacos with mashed lentils in lieu of ground beef, and it was so good, and then we totally ended up making out on his couch while episodes of The Office (U.K. version) played automatically. And then I, uh, spent the night.

Okay, sorry, enough about that. How’d the mountaineering about a profile pic go? Which one’d you go with? I’d suggest the contemplative one of you in the empty tub, aren’t you holding a book too? Like Complete Sophocles or something? I think that’s a good one, sends the right messages, etc. etc. you charming little minx you. And maybe one of you being a goof. And then a sultry stare from one of those roles you had a couple years ago? Tell me tell me tell me all about how the whole thing’s going now that you’re all official and pictured n junk.

On to more pressing matters (clearly). Unicorn. I see two basic modes of thought here. You could go for pun and tongue in cheek, which could elicit response, but maybe not the kind you’re going for (I’m thinking something that plays on horny), or you could go geeky with something like Prongs from HP, or something more random and anticlimactic, like Dave or Joe or whatever, who knows… also, just FYI, this exists: http://www.myangelcardreadings.com/unicornnames.html... and yes, that is a list of 100 unicorn names, complete with annoying little unicorns prancing continuously across the screen. You’re fuckin welcome.

Okay, okay, gotta run to class. But hey, do let me know how things go, and SOON, ma chérie. Not sure when I’ll be free again to hit up Sidewinder and get work done over lavender mochas, but let’s do that soon. I think I’m seeing Devon again today, and, heh, actually tomorrow, too. Things are going MUCH better this time around.

Alright, cheers lady. Kisses.

Rach

P.S. totally forgot, I left you a CD on my way to Devon’s, did you get it? The music section on you profile could use some work. People care about their music. <3

*

68

jdanger89 25 / F / Bisexual / Single Cincinnati, OH

About:

My self-summary

Fuck it, I’m mysterious, I’m textual. Words are windows, friends.

What I’m doing with my life

Not banging dudes on first dates. Not banging ladies on first dates. Definitely not having threeways with straight folk or queer folk or animals or trees.

Things I am doing: volunteering at the library, slinging lattes at Starbucks, drifting drifting drifting, figuring things out, riding tides, reading most of the day away on the couch, howling along to music my friend just gave me, scribbling in notebooks and on napkins and on my arm with sharpie, for no good reason, just cuz.

I’m really good at not responding to people who clearly haven’t read my profile. Also, pretty good at existing in text-based digital personhood. Life in code, searchable, replies selectively.

69 The first things people usually notice about me

The fact that I have no profile picture: mystery, imagination, get to know me and I won’t leave you hanging, but getting to know me is prerequisite.

Favorite books, movies, shows, music, and food

Ibsen, Beckett, Uta Hagen, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Carver, Aristophanes, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, William Carlos Williams, Auden, others

Lost in Translation, others

Can’t think of many TV shows at the moment, don’t spend a whole lot of time watching

Rather un-hip in the music department, and usually require help from friends, but I’m into most of the stuff I hear; local stuff is cool… recently into The Mountain Goats, Concrete Blonde, and The Horrorpops (I get by with a little help from my friends…)

Vegetarian fare, Indian, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Thai

The six things I could never do without

Books with yellowed pages, pad and pen, strong tea, good food, good company

I spend a lot of time thinking about

Crafting sentence fragments. And beginning sentences with conjunctions. And life, sure, let’s go with life.

On a typical Friday night I am

Reading, probably, maybe scribbling nonsense, or out on the town in a bar or coffee shop, hunkered in a corner reading or scribbling and people watching, or staring off into space, or at home sprawled on the couch watching Netflix, or staring at taupe walls thinking of things to cover them with, and avoiding ending sentences with prepositions by adding a deus ex machina phrase. Blah-dy blah.

70 The most private thing I’m willing to admit

Psst. Shhhh, you can’t tell ANYONE, this is just between us. Okay, here goes: I’m. Not. Interested. In. Threesomes.

I’m looking for

 Guys and girls who like bi girls  Ages 22-32  Near me  Who are single  For new friends, long-term dating, short-term dating

You should message me if

You’ve actually read the profile above, and pictureless or no, it sparks your interest, and you want to get to know me. And you’re not an asshole. Also, I need a break from dudes for a minute, sorry fellas. Ladies only for the time being.

*

Subject: RE: Devon n unicorn n stuff From: [email protected] To: [email protected]

Hey hey, Rach, long time no see, eh?

Anyway, sorry for not responding sooner. I thought you were coming over at some point yesterday or the day before or the day before that to put together some of those signs for the book sale tomorrow, and I was going to regale you with the tales of cupidity (in a more abstract sense) and lewdness from my online wanderings.

So, updates: I added that picture of the contemplative dry bathtub, and the goofball one— which, I think we can both agree—may be cute, but is certainly not sexy, and then finally, one that could be described, I suppose, as a “sexy” face while sipping a margarita. Christ on a cracker, dude. Okay, and keep this in mind as well: in a fit of pique, I definitely deleted all the shit I had in those “essays” before starting from scratch (though I basically

71 ended up putting the same things again later, after consideration) and uploading the pics. So, all motherfuckers had to go on were the pictures for a hot minute, nothing else.

Within 30 seconds of adding pictures (literally—it might’ve even been less), dude drops me this message: How was my day you ask? Nothing short of heroic i'd say, but I'll let you be the judge of that. It was just another day at Starbucks. I was pouring coffee when the ground began to tremble. Thinking nothing off it, I went back to my task at hand. To my dismay, the tremors didn't stop. In fact the intensity began to steadily rise. At this moment the customers began to scatter, and a plume of flame and shadows erupted from the chaos. I knew what we were in for. Reaching for my; sword, stave, and grey robe, I leapt over the counter. What happened next played out exactly like this.

And then there’s a link to a YouTube video I didn’t watch, because I feared for my safety. So, I mean, there you have it: first contact.

“Hey gorgeous” “Hey beautiful” “Heyy sweetie : - )” “Hey there” “Hello” “hmmm alrighty” “very attractive” “hi sassy ginger” [pretty sure my hair’s brown, or auburn at the very least] “Can we get married” [no question mark], etc. etc.

There were some helpful dudes offering connections to the theater scene. Some sweet, if dull, messages. Most were trite or offensive or about my hair, or my face, or the margarita. Some guys asking about writing. One guy said my profile was “spares” for a writer. One guy asked if I “always contemplate life while laying in the tub” [pretty sure he meant “lying”… or perhaps he thinks I’m a goose a-layin’?]. The ladies were a little better, but also, ultimately did not seem to actually read the profile.

I made the mistake of engaging with one guy who said he liked my hair, but had “What’s with all the bags of cunts on this site?” on his profile, and it was a little thrilling at first, actually telling a douchebag off, but it got more depressing and more depressing until I wrapped myself in a comforter-cocoon and didn’t move for a few hours.

Also, profile with pictures was up for 3 days (before I deleted pictures) and here are some stats for you: 106 messages, 4 from women, 7 from straight couples, 2 from queer couples, and (even my mediocre math skills can figure this out) that leaves 93 msgs from straight dudes, despite the whole “more into ladies” thing (to be fair, one guy apologized for being male, which, you know, is either cute, funny, or pathetic, depending on your outlook). And, I can’t even make this shit up, I swear to god: 666 profile views as of 2 seconds ago. The number of the fucking beast. There’s also some “quickmatch” thing that has the number “505” by it, but I don’t know what that means.

So, after 3 days of madness, I deleted pictures again, and changed up text, and fuck it, whatever, I may delete it, I may ignore it. Without pictures, it’s not like anyone looks at it anyway. I’m about to just message Alice and ask what she’s up to tonight. Maybe she’s not just an auto-messaging program, maybe there’s a flesh & blood really optimistic human in there, and maybe, just maybe, she’s the love of my life, the person I’ve spent these 26 crappy-ass years looking for.

72 Sorry, I’m being petulant and mopey, but really, are you surprised? How’s Devon, how’s things? Glad they were going well as of the last email, hope that continues. Hang out soon?

Love, always,

Jez

P.S. thanks for musics, I love it. Added Horropops, Concrete Blonde, and Mountain Goats to the profile, not that it matters much. Oh, and the “most private” section is now about how I’m not into threesomes, which I think you’ll appreciate, if we ever hang out and I show you, etc. etc. Okay, sorry, I’m done, love you, talk later.

73 What If You’re Lonely

It begins with a wrong number. She looks at her phone, buzzing on the kitchen table. The number isn’t familiar, but it’s local. She picks it up. “Hello?” “Is this Mary?” It’s a man’s voice. Or a boy’s. It’s kind of high-pitched, but a post- pubescent high-pitched. Ageless in a way. “No, this isn’t Mary. I don’t know a Mary.” “Well, who is this?” “I think you have the wrong number.” “Okay, but who are you?” “I’m Jessica; I’m not Mary.” “Oh, sorry.” “Yeah, bye.” Jessica waits for the line to go dead, not saying more, but it doesn’t go dead. She can hear breathing, not heavy, just faint breaths. It’s not inherently creepy, but it creeps her out. She ends the call and puts her phone back on the table.

*

Then there’s a text. Two short buzzes. She’s making dinner, beans and rice and vegetables. She’s at the stove, stirring the beans. The rice pot is burbling, the glass lid rising and falling softly. She looks over her shoulder at the table, but stays at the stove. It’s too soon after the call, she thinks. Her brain concocts inherently creepy scenarios. She doesn’t even know who the text is from, but she has her suspicions and a part of her does know. The beans still have a while. Probably another half hour. Her roommate’s been gone for five days now. No word. No answers to the few interrogative text messages Jessica sent. Her roommate does this sometimes, and hates when Jessica is “clingy”. Jessica is aware of being alone in the ground-floor apartment, of having been alone for five days, aware that five days of solitude can do strange things to her psychological state. She thinks the text could be from the roommate, explaining her absence, her 74 plans. It could be. But the roommate never explains; she just does what she does and shows up when she does. Never in their year and a half living together has she explained. Jessica stirs the beans again and glances over her shoulder again. Her mind is narrating her actions. It just used too many agains. She wishes she had something more to occupy her than the beans softening on the stove. Something to do that isn’t a repeat of something she’s done.

*

Eventually, Jessica gets bored, and she moves to the phone. New text message from an unknown local number. She knows already that it’s from the man-or-boy. She puts the phone down, goes to her room, and takes the book from her bedside table, and returns to the stove, leafing through the pages. The Brothers Karamazov. She’s meant to start it for years, for years and years, but never thinks she has the time to devote herself fully. It’s a thick volume. It weighs her hands down. She’s had it by her bed, looking through it in the mornings, since she moved to Cincinnati. Which has been a while. Seven months? A long while. So she flips through, stopping here and there, reading sentences. She stirs the beans and cascades pages and stops at a shallow depth. The heading at the top of the page says “Women of Great Faith.” The line her eyes roam to, nesting in the first paragraph is “I can’t get him out of my head. It’s just like he’s standing there, right in front of my eyes and never leaves me. My heart has shriveled up.” She puts the book down and stares at the cover. It’s impressionistic. A scene in snow, with people bundled up and what looks like a palace somewhere back there in all that snow. She’s feeling the words worming around her brain. There are daubs of color: a yellow headscarf, a child’s orange overcoat. The circumstances of reading those lines feel fraught. Everything feels meaningful. She looks at the pieces of color, and all that bluish white.

*

The incoming message is backed in blue against the display: “Hey, Jessica-not-Mary. How’re you? I’m Neil.”

75 She notices the hyphens. The appropriate contraction. It’s how she would punctuate a text message. Neil punctuates well, she thinks. She wonders who she could call, if it turns out she doesn’t want to stay in this empty apartment alone tonight. Rachel is the obvious choice, but she’s been too busy, and she’s away this week with her Devon, something romantic and nauseating. Jessica thinks about the blinds in her room being stuck, unable to close, to shelter like they’re meant to. She’s never worried about it before. That morning, she woke up to the snow outside, in the tree, and a cardinal, fat and red, and some yellow finches at the bird feeder. Bluish snow down in the valley below, past the drop-off beyond the tree. Only a few feet of grass covered in white before the hilltop just ends. Hardly room for a human being to walk. But there’s enough room. Just enough.

*

She decides not to answer, not to tell this Neil to fuck off. She imagines only trouble if she were to antagonize him. She imagines maybe she’s imagining things. But in any case, that high-low voice is not a voice she wants to discompose. She wonders if she should continue reading Dostoyevsky, if her mental state can take it. The book is arching its spine at her from the counter. The beans are ready, the rice is ready. She thinks again of people she could call. There’s a theater friend in Columbus, but that’s too far for 9 PM, and she’s not really sure he’d come through anyway. She has co-workers who seem to care about her troubles. Ellen who bought her a sandwich when she forgot her wallet. Jimmy who gave her a hug when she couldn’t stop crying in the backroom. They nod and grunt at her stories. There’s that guy she slept with whose name is lost to her out in Northside. Another shadowy face in Over the Rhine. The woman downtown with the nipple rings. Jessica vaguely remembers the way to her apartment still. No one, really. She has no one she could call.

*

76 She returns to the Karamazovs—she can’t help herself—flips the pages. The passage affected her. She remembers the number, page 61. She’s looking for context. It’s a woman talking to her father, who can’t get the man out of her head. No, go back further, it’s an elder, but she calls him father, and she’s talking about her dead baby boy, not a man. She keeps losing children. She’s lost three previous. But this one has gotten to her. Jessica is crying, and a tear wets the page, making it translucent. The woman worries her husband is drinking. He drank before, but now she fears it’s worse and will lead to worse still. She’s on a pilgrimage, wants to talk to God, smooth things over. She wants to give up. The elder tells her the dead babies are angels. They are bold and God makes them angels. It’s all right there on the page. Jessica paws at her eyes. The woman’s conjuring her baby boy, Jessica thinks, and that’s why her heart has shriveled. This woman wants her little baby boy there with her. She’s thinking of his little shirt, his tiny shoes. There’s so much longing in it. So much despair. Everything is working together, too many coincidences, Jessica thinks. She’s not sure how, but the book falls from her hand, splaying on the kitchen tile.

*

The beans are undercooked, under-seasoned. They simply are, nothing has made them that way. Her thoughts are in passive voice, and she knows her thoughts are in passive voice. The rice doesn’t do much to help. It is under-seasoned as well, and the vegetables are burnt. If she lets herself, she’ll remember she was the active participant in these things. She burnt the vegetables. She under-seasoned everything. And so she piles on Sriracha to atone. Her mouth burns slightly with each bite. She pours the excess into an old humus container and sticks it in the fridge, among her roommate’s slowly deteriorating perishables. There’s mold in the shredded cheddar. The milk looks curdled. She shuts the fridge door, and her phone buzzes again. This time she goes to it without hesitating: “I know it’s weird; I’m sorry. Let’s start again. Hi, I’m Neil. You don’t know me, which is weird. I’m not asking for anything. But I’m lonely. What if you’re lonely? Can we have a conversation?” She counts the characters. It’s over 160. More like 190-ish. Which means it’s two messages-worth. He must have a smartphone like her, and it mashes the messages together. But 77 Neil didn’t pay attention to the character count, apparently didn’t watch apprehensively as the counter in the corner dropped to 0/1 and then jumped to 145/2. When she texts, the character count is like neon. She’ll revise for hours to keep it under 160, or failing that, to fill up the next 145 characters with meaningful vowels and nouns and prepositions. But also, there’s that semicolon. “What if you’re lonely?” What if. The words rebound in her skull and through the room in which her roommate is conspicuously absent. The couch which usually cradles her cast-off coat is bare. Her music is not seeping from her room. Jessica is finding it difficult to rectify the high-low voice with the text messages. They are like two separate entities, or a Janus face, or tragicomic theatre masks. The woman’s dead babies becoming angels. She feels a rift. Or a precipice. She thinks she might be falling off.

*

She remembers texts she received from the dudes Northside and O.T.R. “Gr8 CU soon” and “Sorry can’t 2nite. Guy nite.” Night is spelled with a “gh” she wanted to reply, “Gr8” saves 2 characters, and depending on the phone’s layout, might not save even a fraction of a second. But instead she stayed silent. Even miss downtown used too many ellipses. Jessica can’t abide overused ellipses, but she would’ve forgiven for miss downtown. And eventually one, then the other, then the other—first O.T.R. or first Northside?—fell silent. Jessica didn’t mourn their passing. And then she’d felt strange, and vomited, and peed on a stick, and got word from the doctor and wanted to scream and scream and scream, and had no one to scream to.

*

She flees from her thoughts. Angels and angels. Lucifer was an angel. Gabriel was an angel. Michael was an angel. And now, she thinks, dead little baby boys are angels. Where are my angels, she thinks. She’s close to tears. She feels it’s dangerous, but she looks to Karamazov, pages warped against the tile floor. Always look to the masters. Page 61. “My heart has shriveled up,” the woman says. 78 On her phone, she types, “What if my heart has shriveled up?” Her thumb hovers over the send button. What if, what if. What the fuck if I’ve lost my goddamn mind? she thinks. She puts the phone down, message unsent, and rubs her temples. She grabs her coat, gloves, puts on boots. Outside it’s snowing lightly. She walks down the drive to the end of the building. She moves around to the other side. Grass crunches under her feet. Blue light flickers behind the blinds in the first apartment window. Shadows move around distorted by angles and flickerings. She moves farther, hugging the building as the ground drops off into the steep-grade downslope. Dark windows. Blinds pulled. She recognizes the tree at her own window by the red plastic bird feeder. The birds have fled to their nests. Its branches are covered in half-sheathes of snow. If she keeps her body parallel, her back to the edge of the hill, she can peer into her bedroom. The lights are out, the blinds caught at an angle near the top, and she sees half herself peering in, and half the interior. Her bed is sitting there, covers ruffled, empty. Piles of clothes on the floor. Light from the kitchen filtering through the crack under her door. It’s a sad little scene. She’s not sure if her absence makes it lonelier, or her presence.

*

There are many memories she tries to dissuade. Things that seem to hover, but vaguely, as if behind a veil. Kyle is the name of one of the men she slept with. Or Chris maybe. Definitely a hard-C sound. She can’t remember if he’s the one in Northside or O.T.R. She’s sure it doesn’t matter. She remembers hard wood floors, beige curtains. The smell of ginger in the morning with Sri Lankan tea, and the way ginger made her mind leap and recoil. Feeling strange in so much indistinct light, the curtains semi-sheer. A bright, dusky sort of dawn, and his face blurring into the pillow, and the shapes and forms around her seeming to fade into one another. It seems the direct obverse of the image through her window, into her dark bedroom. She is trying not to remember, and remembering too much. The feel of the hard wood on her bare feet as she got dressed, not looking at his form rumpling the covers. When she got home, the bottoms of her feet were dark with dirt and she took a shower to scrub herself clean. 79

*

She returns inside, removes her hands from her gloves. She articulates her fingers, looking at them, looking at her phone. Her fingers can push buttons or withhold their pushing. They are adroit. Buttons can be pushed. She reads her message again: “What if my heart has shriveled up?” No semi-colons, no contractions, straight-forward interrogative sentence. Her thumb touches the send button, and the message leaps away from her, into air, into universe. Her thumb hovers, her hand hovers. She feels there’s no longer a “she” at the controls.

*

She can feel her heart beating faster. She’s taking deep breaths, but her heart doesn’t seem to care. It feels the opposite of shriveled. It feels hypertrophied. She curls up into a ball on her bed in the dark room, under the covers. She becomes another rumple in the comforter. She doesn’t know what she wants or what she doesn’t want; what’s been lost, what’s been gained. It’s after 10:30, now. He won’t respond. She decides she doesn’t want him to respond— this is pathetic, beyond pathetic—and gets up, flips on the light. What does Neil offer beyond punctuation? Fyodor’s woman says, “Just looking at his little shirt or his tiny shoes starts me wailing. I put out his things that are left, all of them, and I look at them and wail.” Jessica sighs and closes her eyes on the bed. Her eyes flick to the closet. There is a box there filled with things she is hiding from, among them a pair of tiny shoes.

*

Not long after O.T.R—she thinks it’s O.T.R.—she grabbed boxes of pregnancy tests from the CVS down the street. No, no, no, she thought. Shit, no. A couple weeks later, she had talked to Rachel, wept with Rachel, reasoned with Rachel, made peace. 80 A week after that, she found a knitting pattern online, chevrons in light blue and brown, and began knitting after her shift, feeling a sort of serenity she hadn’t felt before. She went with Rachel to a baby store, found a pair of tiny buckled shoes that tickled her fancy. They made her smile, and Rachel smile at her goofy smile.

*

She checks her phone and throws it in a corner on a pile of work-clothes, and strikes her thighs with her fists. “My heart has shriveled, my heart has shriveled,” she says aloud, in a whisper to no one. She moves to the closet and finds the box, and pulls out the unfinished wad of blue and brown, the edge looking frayed where the stiches have come apart. Below are the loose rolls of yarn, and the shoes. The tiny silver buckle winking in the incandescence. A red onesie. At the bottom of the box is the bed sheet stained with red. Fyodor’s omniscient narrator on the page previous says, “Such grief does not seek consolation but feeds on an awareness of its hopelessness. The wailing simply satisfies the constant need to irritate the wound.”

*

She is not sure when she started crying, nor when she stopped, but her cheeks are wet and she keeps wiping at her eyes compulsively. She crosses to the work clothes and picks up her phone. One new message from an unknown number. She reads it and frowns, and reads it again, and runs to the bed to pick up The Brothers Karamazov. “ ‘You will shed a mother’s tears for a long time to come, but in the end, your weeping will turn into quiet joy.’ ” This is what the text read. Quotation marks and all. She is shivering, and she reads page 61 and flips the page and reads almost to the bottom of 62, running her finger over the words. There it is. “You will shed a mother’s tears for a long time to come, but in the end, your weeping will turn into quiet joy,” but it doesn’t stop there, Fyodor continues, the sentence keeps moving, “and your bitter tears will become tears of quiet tenderness which will cleanse your heart of sin.” 81 She drops the book and drops her phone. Things have gotten out of hand, she thinks; things are impossible, and she begins wailing, thinking she may never stop.

82 Suburban Still-Life

It’s after midnight, and he’s coming home with lipstick on his collar, garish red, which Jessica wore for the occasion, their last they agreed. Lipstick he asked Jessica to put there, a scripted kiss on his neckline, because he never did see how lipstick would get there on its own— her lips mostly stayed on his, or lower, but tended to avoid his clothes. He lifts his chin, eyes flicking to the collar in the rearview, and his hands grip the wheel tighter. There’s little traffic, and he makes it through the strip malls quickly, and then he’s in the driveway, the headlights seeming to smolder in the white garage door. His eyes rest on the collar again, and then he’s out of the car and through the front door and climbing the stairs. He doesn’t remember if he left his keys in the lock. There’s a slight tremor to his legs, and he feels like he’s either floating or collapsing. The third step has a creak to it, and he puts his foot on it, pausing, listening to the sound carry to the second floor and through the cracked door to the bedroom he shares with his wife. The column of lamplight on the wall expands and contracts as the door wobbles with changes in the air pressure. His wife will be awake, reading, or trying to read, or maybe just pretending to try. Waiting, glancing at the clock, then the door, then the page filled with words she’s already brushed her eyes over without comprehending. Perhaps tapping her teeth with a fingernail. This is how he’s found her on other nights. Once she was pretending to sleep, slouched against the headboard, mouth open, book on the floor, pages scrunched. He could tell by her breathing. When he reaches the door, he pauses, takes a breath. He adjusts his jacket, loosening it around his shoulders, thinking of the angle of the bedside lamp, knowing the collar will be unavoidable in the glare. He steps inside, the door creaking on its hinges, just as his wife glances from book to clock to door. It feels like a script, actors playing their parts. He feels her eyes slide from his face to his neckline. The red is a shade too gaudy for his wife’s lips. He can’t remember the last time she wore lipstick. He can’t remember when things began to slide. He stands, looking into his wife’s eyes, their faces caught in time, still impassive but on the verge of something. Her head is bent forward from the headboard, her lower half covered by 83 the duvet; the book is flopped backward on her lap, the words staring at the ceiling, a few pages risen from the others, in limbo. His hands are in his pockets, his body leaning into the room. He can’t imagine what his face looks like. They seem caught in this moment; it distends. They’re waiting, poised. They’re frozen. Nothing changes. They’re waiting for what’s coming next.

84

Heartland Theatre Company P.O. Box 1493; Champagne, IL 61824-1493 (217) 344 – 3664; [email protected]

June 30, 2014 Dear Jessica Danger,

I would personally like to thank you for submitting your play, “Everyone Laugh: A Suicidal Porch Party,” to the 7th annual New Plays of the Heartland One-Act Play Competition. After close consideration, however, our panel of local theatre artists unfortunately did not select your play as one of our finalists. While we enjoyed your play, we feel it does not quite match with our theme of “Escape,” and, unfortunately, we do not feel it is the best fit for our audience here. We sincerely regret that the great volume of submissions we received this year makes it impossible to provide you with more detailed feedback on your submission. We wish you success in placing your work elsewhere.

I would again like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to become acquainted with your work. On a personal note, I have to say that I disagree with the judges’ assessment that your play diverges from the theme of “Escape,” and I feel that a certain degree of misapprehension of the depth and breadth of thematic possibilities inherent in “Escape” were partly at fault in this case. I felt a personal connection to this piece and was disappointed it was not chosen as a finalist. I saw on your submission form that you are currently writing out of Cincinnati, OH, and while it is not, I know, an inconsiderable distance to travel, I would like to extend an invitation to visit our city of Champagne, a pleasant and vibrant community, despite the judges’ narrow view of “Escape.” They are only a small contingent and not necessarily representative of the community at large.

I know it is a bit unorthodox, but if you should be interested in a visit out here, I have a large and comfortable air mattress I could put at your disposal. I have included my personal contact information on the reverse side of this sheet, should you decide to get in contact with me. I wish you all the best in your creative and professional endeavors.

Very Sincerely,

Arthur Jenkins Artistic Director Heartland Theatre Company

85

EVERYONE LAUGH: A SUICIDAL PORCH PARTY

An autobiographical play in one act

By Jessica Danger

© 2014 Jessica Danger 7011 Summit Lake Dr. Apt 17 Cincinnati, OH 45247 (541) 760 – 7742 [email protected] 86 CAST OF CHARACTERS

RACHEL female, mid-20s, a Literature grad student

JESSICA female, mid-20s, new-ish-in-town friend of RACHEL, recently heartbroken, recently devastated, kind of on the edge of something

DEVON male, mid-20s, a philosophy grad student, RACHEL’s boyfriend

JAMES male, mid-20s, a bit manic, recently suicidal

FRED male, mid-20s, DEVON’s housemate

ZOE canine, getting on in years, also a housemate, hobbles a bit

TIME

Present

PLACE

Residential neighborhood near the UC campus. Cincinnati mid-summer at night. The porch of a well-kept, two-story house taken over by grad students (so a little ragged around the edges), lit by a cobwebbed porchlight overhead. There are a couple mismatched lawn chairs arranged around a rough-hewn wooden table that looks homemade by amateurs; to the left of the table, a well-made porch swing that came with the house. A low wooden railing surrounds the porch, parting for the front steps; a few balusters are missing here and there. The steps lead to a wooden door with fairly ornate glass design, smudged and looking a touch unseemly. The steps and door are off-center, leaving more porch to the left of them than to the right. Bushes, about porch-floor- height, flank the steps and wrap around the front of the house. A curtained window left of the door shows a light on inside; the upper story is dark. An uneven brick path leads from the sidewalk at the edge of the stage, through a shaggy yard, to the steps.

87 (The porch is deserted, except a number of empty bottles— probably ten or so—strewn on the floor boards, the table, the porch balustrade. Smoke rises from an ashtray at the center of the table amidst a dozen or so butts.

After 30 seconds of nothing happening, a text-messaged conversation is projected onto the scene, distorted by the set, so that it is difficult to read—perhaps only phrases and intimations can be parsed—the image of which appears below.)

(After the image has been projected on stage for approximately 45 seconds, it cuts off and rapidly flashes to the next image, as before, continuing the text-versation, pictured below. This is projected for another 45 seconds and cuts off right before the voices are heard.)

88

RACHEL (off, directly following the disappearance of the second image) Shit, I’m really really sorry.

JESSICA (off) No, it’s fine. Quit apologizing.

RACHEL (off) I wanted to show you a good time tonight, I really did. Well, thanks for coming with. And free beer, so there’s that. We can go whenever you want, I swear. We’ll have a signal. (They enter, walking side-by-side, Rachel looking at Jessica, and Jessica looking at the sidewalk several paces in front of her.) Like, say asparagus when you want to leave, and we’ll leave. Cool? (JESSICA nods. RACHEL glances at empty porch, beer bottles, tendril of smoke.) Devon said they’d be on the porch. (looks around pointedly) He’s getting unreliable. But this guy James, shit—.

89 JESSICA I know. Seems pretty fucked up. How serious did Devon sound?

(RACHEL is about to answer when the front door opens, and DEVON and JAMES exit the house with a six-pack of bottles each. JAMES’ eyes are noticeably squinty and the front few rows might also be able to see he could use a drop or three of Clear Eyes. JAMES walks to the porch swing without acknowledging RACHEL or JESSICA.)

DEVON (smiling, speaking enthusiastically) Rachel, hey! Glad you could make it! Come on up.

(RACHEL mounts the steps where she and DEVON embrace. JESSICA ventures to the foot of the steps and looks at her feet. JAMES opens a bottle by positioning the lip of the cap on the armrest of the swing and striking the top with the palm of his hand, the loud-ish bang of which causes JESSICA to look at him. JAMES silently toasts her; JESSICA smiles a small smile, but JAMES does not.)

DEVON You guys want a beer? We got these and a couple more inside, or there’s the PBR leftovers, or— . Whatever you want. (spreading his arms and pronouncing the Spanish words almost annoyingly hyper-correctly, affecting an accent) Mi casa es su casa. James, this is Rachel. (JAMES nods at her.) And this, I assume, is…

RACHEL Oh, shit. (gesturing at JESSICA) Yeah, this is Jessica. She’s a fairly recent transplant from Oregon. (JAMES perks up a bit at the mention of Oregon.)

JESSICA (with an awkward little wave) He-ey. Devon, I’ve heard of you. (smiles to cover the ambiguity of the statement—then, mounting the steps, looking to JAMES) Hello. (JAMES nods; they shake hands briefly)

DEVON 90 Well, ladies, have a seat, join the soiree. (He sits in one of the lawn chairs. RACHEL rolls her eyes at JESSICA behind DEVON’s back and mouths “soiree.” JESSICA smiles noncommittally.) Oh, Jessica, you can have the other chair if Rachel takes a seat here—. (pats his lap, looks up at RACHEL with a goofy grin on his face)

JESSICA (glancing quickly at RACHEL, who’s looking rather annoyedly off into the audience) Oh no, this, uh, railing seems good. (moves between the table and chairs and the rail toward the porch swing and sits/leans against the balustrade at an angle, half-turned from the audience) Um—. (looks at DEVON and RACHEL, engaging in a mumbled exchange, seemingly argumentative in nature, but not heatedly so; turns to JAMES) So uh—.

JAMES Oregon?

JESSICA Yeah. Corvallis. Well, Albany, most recently. They’re close together.

JAMES I was out there for a while once. Just a couple months. On the coast and in the valley, mostly.

JESSICA Mmm.

DEVON Oh shit, lemme grab a bottle opener. Hey, Rach, join me? Eh? Yeah? (bounces his eyebrows, rubs RACHEL’s shoulders) Give us a sec, you two.

(RACHEL pauses, looks to JESSICA, then nods. They move to the door, and RACHEL mouths “Sorry” to JESSICA. JAMES catches this.)

JAMES (seemingly to his beer) They’ve left us. (to JESSICA, looking up)

91 Not that your company isn’t welcome, of course. I just struggle mightily with abandonment issues. Adopted and all that. Do you have a happy home-life, miss Jessica?

JESSICA Um. What?—Miss?

JAMES I had an English teacher in grade school. Unmarried. We called her “Miss Jessica.”

JESSICA Ah. I had a boss named James back in Oregon. He was a bag of tools.

JAMES Well, shit.

JESSICA Sorry, I didn’t mean—you don’t seem like a tool bag, it was just a name thing. Like me and Miss Jessica. Was she a good teacher?

JAMES She was okay. Nice, but a little spacey. Let’s agree that names don’t mean everything.

JESSICA Deal.

JAMES So, Jessica, do you have a happy home-life? Weird question, I know. I’m in a weird mood. Feel free to ignore me.

JESSICA No, it’s fine, I don’t mind. I might be in a weird mood myself. Uh, yeah, I guess so. Sure. Everyone has—issues sometimes.

JAMES Sure. Issues. Sorry, I don’t know where I’m going with this. (pause) You smoke?

JESSICA I—I didn’t used to. But I started a while ago. An irregular thing. Stress.

JAMES I see. (proffers pack to JESSICA; she takes one, hands it back and JAMES lights it for her.) How about weed? 92

JESSICA No. Not really.

(Pause. JESSICA fiddles with her hands, cigarette hanging from her mouth. JAMES watches the smoke from his cigarette. The front door opens, and DEVON and RACHEL exit the house, close together.)

DEVON (holding up a bottle opener) Got it. Can I open one for ya, Jess?

(JESSICA nods. He opens a beer and hands it to her.)

RACHEL Jessica. DEVON and JESSICA (together) What?

RACHEL She’s Jessica. Not “Jess.”

DEVON Jessica. Right. (to JAMES, who’s gotten up, stubbed out his cigarette, and finished his beer) Going inside? I’ll run in, too. See if Fred wants to join for a bit. (He gets up, and they go inside.)

RACHEL Sorry for leaving you stranded. How’s James seem?

JESSICA He seems—I dunno. Not that suicidal, really. More like—bereft maybe.

RACHEL (narrowing her eyes) Uh-huh. Are you—are you, like, into him?

JESSICA Not at the moment, no. I’m not into anyone.

RACHEL

93 I think it’d be alright, you know. If you got out of your funk. That’d be good. Just—I worry. About your, uh, choices sometimes.

JESSICA Fuck you. We’re here because of you. I was happy to grab a drink at the bar and hunker. You brought me out here. For Devon. Which is fine. But don’t start projecting ulterior motives on me. I’m happy to tag along. Don’t make me the protagonist here.

RACHEL Ha, okay. Sorry. (pause) Big speech. It was nice. (hints of a hopeful smile)

JESSICA Well. You bring it on yourself. (nudges RACHEL with her elbow) Hunh? Right? Buddy?

RACHEL (laughing) Right. Quit it, you’re right, okay?

(DEVON and JAMES re-enter, followed by FRED, who’s carrying a guitar carelessly by the neck.)

FRED (affecting a rather sad Southern accent) Y’all wanna hear some tunes? Finest stummin’ this side of the Mississippi! (He looks to JESSICA, doffs a non-existent cap and bows.) Little lady.

DEVON (to JESSICA, shoving FRED playfully) This miscreant is Fred. A resident here. He thinks he’s funny. (to FRED, glancing at JAMES) Play us a tune, ole boy!

(As FRED takes a seat on the steps, guitar in lap, JAMES sidles past DEVON, FRED, and RACHEL, and resumes his seat at the porch swing without a word or glance at the others. JESSICA’s eyes follow him. FRED begins to strum, humming tune to “Ring of Fire.” JAMES stares off into space.)

DEVON (nudges RACHEL, points to ash tray) 94 Ring of Fire! See?

(Laugh track plays for a few seconds—out of the blue—gets cut off abruptly. No one on stage laughs.)

RACHEL Oh, very nice. Philosophical even.

FRED Devon’s humor is high-brow. It’s just that no one understands him. Right, James? James’ll sometimes give a pity-chuckle here and there. (He starts a new song, “Cocaine Blues,” playing louder, and singing.) “Early one mornin’ while makin’ the rounds, I took a shot of cocaine and shot my woman down—.” (He trails off, but continues strumming. The upper story window blazes, and there’s the muffled bang of a door being slammed inside, and all heads turn to the front door. FRED misses a few beats strumming, but continues, haphazard.) Uh oh. I think the missus is pissed.

DEVON Maybe a little softer on the strings, buddy?

(FRED stops playing, gets up and sticks his head in the door. ZOE muzzles her way through the door and hobbles out.)

FRED I think the storm’s passed. Aw, Zoe baby, did I wake you? (He sets aside the guitar, embraces ZOE, and scratches her chin. During the next few lines, ZOE meanders over to JESSICA, then JAMES, then RACHEL, getting love from each of them in turn, though she pauses longest at JAMES, and puts her head in his lap.)

RACHEL She’s adorable. Damn, how old is she?

FRED Ancient. We don’t really know, shelter dog.

DEVON We love our strays around here.

FRED (a brief glance at JAMES, speaks under his breath) Dude, James. A little more consideration maybe. 95

(JAMES catches JESSICA’s eye and rolls his eyes, turns away from everyone.)

DEVON Chill, it’s fine. (glances at JAMES) But, hey, maybe it’s a little late for music, yeah?

FRED Probably. I better go apologize anyway, don’t need any domestic strife. Zoe, girl, c’mon. (stands and grabs DEVON’s beer and takes a deep pull; to DEVON) Took a shot of cocaine and away I run. (Laugh track plays, as before—brief and cuts off abruptly. FRED picks up guitar as he moves back to the door, ushering ZOE inside. Just before the door shuts, he speaks just loud enough to be overheard) Hey, babe, I thought it might cheer up—. (The door shuts behind him, cutting off the rest of the sentence. JESSICA, RACHEL, and DEVON gaze at their feet.)

JAMES (looking at the others, in turn) For fuck’s sake. (stands, grabs a beer, turns his back to the others as he opens it as before, without sitting, wobbles a bit as he strikes the top) Whatever. Hey, Dev, weed’s kicking in. You got anything to eat in there?

DEVON Not really. (looks at JAMES as he sways) Uh, Rach and I could walk to the store real quick. Just a block or two. Grab us all something.

RACHEL Or we all could go. (She and DEVON share a non-verbal exchange. The upstairs light goes out.)

JAMES (turning back to them) No, no, Devon’s right. Look at me, staggering around like ole Zoe, image of mortality itself. Can’t leave me alone though, right? And you two lovebirds wouldn’t mind a little alone time, would you? So Jessica, you’re on guard duty, got it? Dev and Rachel, you’re on appeasement duty. Gotta keep me happy, remember. I’m a ticking little time bomb. Ready? Everyone? Break!

96 (Laugh track—as before, cuts off. He takes a drink and puts the bottle down.) I gotta piss. (He edges past DEVON and RACHEL, down the steps, and moves around the side of the house, out of sight. Sound of piss.)

RACHEL (to DEVON, hushed) Should Jessica and I leave, do you think?

DEVON No, no. It’s fine. Stay. But maybe we should go grab some food?

RACHEL (looking at JESSICA) Like asparagus? (JESSICA shakes her head)

DEVON (not hushed) What? No, like chips or a few of those crappy burritos or something. What are you talking about? Asparagus. James’d kick me in the balls if I brought back asparagus.

JAMES (off) Don’t you forget it! (JESSICA laughs, stifles it, covers her mouth.)

RACHEL (softly, to JESSICA) You don’t mind waiting here? It’s just—.

JESSICA No, go. It’s fine. Really.

(JAMES enters, a bit steadier, resumes seat on porch swing and drinks his beer.)

DEVON (to JAMES) Alright, you want anything in particular, object of my appeasement?

JAMES Surprise me, Dev-y ole boy, surprise me.

RACHEL 97 (to JESSICA) You?

JESSICA If they’ve got any crappy pizza alongside the crappy burritos, I wouldn’t turn it down.

RACHEL (laughing) Of course. I’ll see what I can do. (She gathers her purse, and she and DEVON link arms and walk down the steps, speaking as they go. JESSICA and JAMES watch them leave in silence.)

DEVON I hope they have Funyuns. God, I’m a sucker for Funyuns.

RACHEL Ugh, gross. Freudian Funyuns. You really need to—. (Her voice fades as she exits. JAMES and JESSICA sit in silence for a moment. Then:)

JAMES Want to play hangman?

JESSICA Um, sure. (Pause. She looks to JAMES. Then, smiling:) A little morbidity never hurt anyone, right? (laugh track, cuts off abruptly) I always make the hanged man look like Hitler. I don’t know why.

JAMES That’s pretty good. I usually go with my father. Birth father. The adoptive one’s alright.

JESSICA Mmm.

JAMES (taking out a small note pad and rather nice felt-tip pen from his jeans pocket; sketches for a moment) Okay, got one. Scaffold erected. Dawn approaching. Condemned man waiting for his body parts to show up piecemeal under a noose. Eight letters. Go.

JESSICA (never taking her eyes off JAMES, who stares back at her, marking in the note pad, and drawing in the pauses) 98 Eight letters? Okay. (boring into his eyes with her own; pause) S.

JAMES Yup.

(Pause.)

JESSICA U.

JAMES Mmhmm.

JESSICA I.

JAMES Two of them.

JESSICA C. (JAMES nods.) D. (pause) A. (pause) L.

JAMES (nodding, finally breaking their gaze to look at the note pad) Well, look at that. You sunk my battleship. (laugh track, cuts off abruptly)

JESSICA Cute. (pause) What were you drawing? I got all the letters right and spared the poor devil his noose, but you were still drawing something.

(He shows her the pad. An image of what is contained there is projected onto the scene, as before, distorted by the set, difficult to parse. Something like below.)

99

JAMES Suicidal condemned folk don’t care if you get the letters right. He just ducked into the noose on his own. See? His little feet still kicking, even though he chose this. We call that Gallows Humor. (He chuckles, laugh track joins, cuts off, his chuckles fade.)

JESSICA Jesus. You’re lucky it’s just me out here. Those other two would’ve freaked. (pause) I like the little wobble lines though. Definitely a nice touch.

JAMES I feel it’s best to laugh about these things, and wobble lines seem humorous in any context. (The projected image fades. He squints at her.) I figured you could handle it okay.

JESSICA What made you think that?

JAMES You don’t tip-toe. Or don’t seem to. When you said, “Everyone has issues” or whatever earlier— I dunno. You didn’t—shrink away from me. 100

JESSICA Well, fuck it. What’s to shrink from?

JAMES Right.

JESSICA So, if you don’t mind my asking. What’s got Devon all worried?

JAMES Fuckin’ Devon. You gotta have kid gloves around that dude. It’s not his place—.

JESSICA Or mine either.

JAMES No, or yours either. (pause) You know how I told you I went to Oregon a while ago? Valley—coast, that nonsense? (JESSICA nods.) Well, it was escapism. Pure and simple.

JESSICA I understand that. (pause) I mean, I’m out here doing the same thing. Running away. And you know, sometimes I feel like I just keep making messes I’ll need to run away from again.

JAMES Yeah?

JESSICA Yeah.

JAMES Care to elaborate?

JESSICA Not really. Do you?

(They sit in silence. JAMES finishes his beer, grabs another. Opens it as before, the sound of JAMES striking the cap bring JESSICA’s eyes to him again.)

JAMES 101 (holding out the beer out to JESSICA) Ready for another? (JESSICA finishes hers and nods, putting the empty on the railing next to her and taking the proffered bottle. JAMES opens a second, and they toast each other silently. Pause.)

JESSICA Why do you open them like that? Devon brought out the bottle opener.

JAMES I like to. I dunno. (looks at her a moment) Something about the pain of it. The physical effort. Like—.

JESSICA Like it means something.

JAMES Right.

(pause)

JESSICA That’s why I started smoking, I think. The way it—.

JAMES The way it burns a little.

JESSICA Right.

(silence)

JAMES You don’t have to sit awkwardly on the railing, by the way. There’s enough room on the swing. I’m not making a move or any weird shit like that. I’m just saying—. (He trails off. JESSICA stands, moves beside him, sits down, a chaste space left between their thighs.) Well, here’s to Issues, with a capital “I.” (They hoist bottles and drink.)

JESSICA Another game of hangman?

JAMES Sure. 102 (hands her the pad and pen) But make it snappy, yeah? Before those other two get back with their forced cheer.

JESSICA (thinks a moment, pen to a corner of her mouth, then scribbles a bit, pauses, exes out previous scribble, flips page, pauses, scribbles some more, etc. Finally:) Okay, got it. Gallows ready. Seven letters: go.

JAMES (As previously, but roles reversed, they never break each other’s gaze, and JESSICA draws on the pad periodically.) Hm. I think I’ll have a more difficult time of it than you. You’re harder to read. (pause, squinting with effort) E?

JESSICA Nope.

JAMES A.

JESSICA No. JAMES I. (JESSICA shakes her head) O? (shakes her head again) Christ. Okay, U.

JESSICA Yup, two of them.

JAMES Can I see?

(JESSICA shows him the pad. As before, the image is projected onto the set.)

103

JAMES Treading dangerous waters. Without arms. Even more dangerous. (Laugh track cuts in and out briefly. Jessica returns pad to her lap. Image fades.) S.

JESSICA Yup. At the end.

JAMES Plural. Hm. (pause) R.

JESSICA Nope.

JAMES N.

JESSICA Yes. Two of them. After the “U”s.

JAMES I’m on to you. F. (JESSICA nods) 104 Y.

JESSICA (smiling a private smile) Why not? (extremely clipped laugh track, barely a “ha” before it cuts out)

JAMES You kept drawing after I got it, too. Show me?

(JESSICA shows. As before.)

JESSICA He’s happy, because he has Funyuns. (laugh track, JESSICA and JAMES chuckle along with it, laugh track cuts out abruptly, their chuckles fade slowly)

JAMES You drew Devon.

JESSICA Oh shit. I did, didn’t I? That’s kind of evil of me.

(Laughter from off stage, DEVON’s and RACHEL’s voices. JESSICA hurriedly gives JAMES the pad and pen, and he stuffs them in his pocket. Simultaneously, the projected image cuts out.)

105 DEVON (off) —and Foucault, right? So, like, in Discipline and Punish he talks—

RACHEL (off) Seriously, Devon, I’m not following any of this—.

DEVON (as they enter, DEVON carrying a plastic bag) But you’ll have to take theory eventually—. (looks at JESSICA and JAMES on the porch swing) Hey-a! Miss me?

RACHEL Don’t you mean, “Miss us?”

DEVON Right, miss us.

JESSICA (indicating the bag, sharing a glance with JAMES) Whatcha got there?

RACHEL (looking hard at JESSICA) Like, did we get any asparagus?

DEVON Seriously, what’s up with you and asparagus today?

JESSICA No, no asparagus for me, thanks. I’m fine. But what did you get?

DEVON We got you your pizza, they put it in this weird box thing. And a couple burritos for James and Rachel—.

JAMES (again sharing a glance with JESSICA) And for you?

DEVON They were out of Funyuns! So I—.

106 (JESSICA and JAMES erupt with laughter. DEVON shares a puzzled look with RACHEL. RACHEL narrows her eyes and the two on the swing, still at opposite ends of the bench, a demure space between them.)

DEVON (smiling, the start of a chuckle in his voice) But what’s so—?

(Laugh track now joins JESSICA and JAMES, but does not fade out.)

RACHEL (beginning to laugh in spite of herself) Why are you guys—?

(They are all laughing now, the laugh track growing in volume, and JAMES takes the pad from his pocket and tosses it to DEVON. The previous image is again projected on the screen. DEVON and RACHEL look at it, look at each other, look at JAMES and JESSICA, still laughing, but uncertainly now.)

JAMES (speaking between laughs, nearly having to shout to be heard over the laugh track, still swelling) Funyuns! He’s happy because he has Funyuns!

JESSICA (between laughs, also raising her voice to be heard) And you’re sad because you don’t have Funyuns! (They all continue laughing, now more for laughter’s sake than for anything that’s been said or done. JESSICA is bent over holding her knees. JAMES’ head is lolling on the back of the porch swing. RACHEL and DEVON are leaning on each other for support. The upstairs light comes on. As the curtain falls. The image and laugh track remain, the image becoming rippled but more legible against the folds of the curtain.)

107

CURTAIN

108 A Jessica Prepares

But reality is theatrical, in the very best sense of the word. – Uta Hagen

On her bookshelf, near the middle of the second row, Jessica finds what she is looking for, next to Artaud, Brecht, and, on the other side, Stanislavski. It is a secondhand old hardbound book, missing its dust jacket. She remembers picking it up from the untidy stacks of a dusty bookshop in downtown Corvallis, back when she was in high school. The spine is a little cracked and worn, but she can still make out A Challenge for the Actor and Uta Hagen’s name. Jessica runs her fingers over the slightly inset lettering, and lifts it from the shelf. It was required for her theater class one year—Junior year?—but she didn’t read it, barely flipped through the pages, finding other things more important at the time. She didn’t need tips from some aging actress. It was again required in college, and she did read it. She began the first day of classes, thinking to skim the Prologue, see what she was getting herself into, and then she had read half of it. She finished two days later. Through her unemployed final weeks in Oregon, she paged through again when she was at a loss and adrift and couldn’t bring herself to be Jessica Danger anymore. Now, she finds herself in a similar frame of mind—and dissimilar. She wants to be Jessica Danger, but she wants to be a different, better version. Jessica 2.0. Or maybe she’s on 4.0, perhaps 7.0. She’s lost track. She knows, however, that she needs an upgrade. She flips to the Six Steps. Here is what she needs. The page reads:

1. Who Am I? A). What is my present state of being? B). How do I perceive myself? C). What am I wearing?

2. What Are The Circumstances? A.) What time is it? B.) Where am I? C.) What surrounds me? D.) What are the immediate circumstances?

3. What Are My Relationships? How do I stand in relationship to the circumstances, the place, the objects, the other people related to my circumstances? 109

4. What Do I Want? What is my main objective? My immediate need or objective?

5. What Is My Obstacle? What is in the way of what I want? How do I overcome it?

6. What Do I Do To Get What I Want? How can I achieve my objective? What’s my behavior? What are my actions?

Jessica pulls a notebook and pen from her desk and begins writing:

1. I am Jessica Danger A). Present state of being: alone in this apartment. Not caring about the state I’m in, because roommate isn’t home. Damaged, on the mend. Holding in my hands the cell phone with Rachel’s text and James’ number newly added to Contacts. Crisscross-applesauced on the floor in front of my bookshelf, kind of pathetically preparing myself for possibility. And I’m kind of ignoring the point of this exercise, but no longer: I am preparing myself to push the silly phone button, wait as it rings, and be ready for someone to pick up on the other end. I have a plan. There is a restaurant. They won’t be too busy tonight. I have Rachel’s assurances about feelings and reciprocations and compatibilities. I have faith that I can do this. I can make the first move, instead of agreeing with other people’s plans, doing as others want, fulfilling other expectations and desires. For once. It’s been a while, I might be fucking this all up. B). How I see myself: NOT nervous. I’m confident; I am a successful young barista. I get good tips. But I’m more than that, too. I have something many people don’t. I write, I act. I have aspirations and some modicum of talent. I hope. No, I do, people I know and love (Rachel) tell me, and I choose to trust her. I am NOT an emotionally unavailable train wreck. I am NOT letting the past crowd out my present. I am not un-mendable. I am a catch, but not a stuck-up asshole. Humility and confidence. I’m attractive, intelligent. I am open to new people, to new things. I am also sometimes full of shit.

110 C). I am NOT wearing these tattered shorts and unwashed tank top. I’m in a cute sweater, the fancy cashmere thing I got for Christmas but never wear. I’ve dug out my good-butt jeans. I have on actual panties, kinda lacy, self-esteem boosting. Ha, wait, holy shit, that’s a line in here somewhere… yup: “[Laurette Taylor] believed her work of identification was incomplete until she was ‘wearing the underpants of the character.’” Fucking right. A little foundation, touch of eye-liner, nude lipstick. Hair in a bun.

2. Circumstances: Not Dire A). It’s a little after 6, October, not too cold yet, thankfully. I’m off work early, a whole evening sprawled out ahead of me, tons of potential. B). I’m in Cincinnati, in my apartment, a safe place, no roommate to distract or give me shit today, close to Northside, plenty of restaurants nearby, options for all sorts of palates if James isn’t into Indian. The apartment is NOT a mess, because I’ve just spent a bunch of fictitious time cleaning, in case I follow my recent pattern and blow it and go too fast and spiral… C). Weather outside: not frightful. Fire: not delightful, nonexistent in fact, because there’s no fireplace. Brain: Christmas songs in October? What the hell’s wrong with me? Books surrounding me, comforting. Car keys not lost, on the counter where I left them, wallet, purse, cute shoes, hair looking good and behaving for once, condoms just in case. Should I ditch the condoms? D). I just got the text from Rachel. Well, like, hours ago, I got it. She bumped into him. He wanted me to have his number. He’d like it if I’d call. Rachel sent smiley faces, lots of them, she is not careless with her smileys. I have his number saved, I have his number pulled up, a thumb away from a call. I’m confident. He’ll pick up, I won’t trip over my words, I’ll be charming, we’ll laugh, he’ll want to go out to a restaurant with me, grab dinner. We’ll leave it at that, right? He won’t pressure, he’ll wait for signs from me, allow me to be naturally hesitant cautious judicious, as usual. I won’t blow it.

3. Relationships: Numerous, Complex 111 I am comfortable in this role as instigator. Of course I am. I am confident in the outcome, and the wisdom of actually trying this, confident I’m ready, confident I won’t fall apart. I know this town now. I know this restaurant, and backup restaurants. I know how to get from here to there, I have a car that works, it won’t fall apart yet, I’ll order the Saag Paneer. Rachel is a pretty good judge of situations/characters, Devon notwithstanding including Devon, mostly. She’s confident about James. I trust her in this. More than I trust myself. James and I connected on that porch. At least I think we did. I wasn’t ready to admit it, but Jessica 7.0 is. I can look back with clearer lenses, because I cleaned my glasses. But I’m not idealizing either, I didn’t pop in rosy inserts. No, I’ll keep my objectivity, or at least as much as a human entity can be objective. I’m not just doing this because it’s easy, because he seems (according to Rachel) to be interested. I’m doing this because I’m interested. Right?

4. I Want… … … …to be happy, well-adjusted, to love and be loved, and Jesus Christ to not sound this disgustingly sappy, holy hell. I want some things to go right for a while. I want to not fuck up. I want James to be the person I hope he is. I want to not get ahead of myself. I want to not subsume myself. I want James to want these things, for himself and me, and maybe for us to converge. Main objective: happiness, the ability to decipher myself, a healthy, worthwhile relationship. Immediate objective: touching the green phone next to James’ name and speaking in coherent sentences.

5. The Most Apposite Question of My Entire Life, To Date

112 My obstacle. Lord, who knows? Overthinking sounds too easy. Bad Luck sounds too easy. Bad track record sounds too easy. Poor decisions sounds too easy. Incurring divine wrath sounds too easy. Not trying hard enough. Overcome through… trying harder?

6. To Get What I Want, I… …study this sheet. I practice. I pick up the shit off the floor, clean the dishes, make this place less of a sty. I shower, get into my sexy panties and jeans and sweater, do my hair, maybe even dust off the makeup case, slip on the cute shoes. Run my lines again. Call Rachel for support, run my opening lines with her. Rehearse. Look at myself in the mirror. Look into my own eyes. Find what I want there. Interrogate it. Confirm it. Follow through with it. I am confident. I dig out my phone, hover my thumb. I breathe. I send electrical impulses through my synapses, telling my thumb to fall. And I wait. Calm. The phone starts to ring. “Hello?”

113 Collected Wedding Ephemera

Subject: Obligatory Wedding Freak-Out From: Jessica ([email protected]) To: JamesDear ([email protected])

Should we get a professional live-Tweeter? Who’s managing our wedding’s Facebook event page? Whose idea was it to create that thing anyway? Should we do digital programs, so people can follow along on their phones and tablets? Signal jammers so people are actually forced to look up from their devices at crucial moments? Webcasted wedding? iPads propped in chairs for absentees to Skype-in? Why even hold it in a physical space? Second Life wedding? WoW wedding? Do we need to hire a CGI studio for our avatars? Fucking Pixar? When the time comes, should we kiss pictures of each other on our cell phone screens?

Sorry to bug you at work.

Love,

Jessica

Subject: RE: Obligatory Wedding Freak-Out From: James ([email protected]) To: DarlingDanger ([email protected])

Good questions. The signal jammer strikes a chord; the WoW wedding—not so much. I love you. The real question should be Whose Physical Presence Do You NOT Want? We’ll banish them to digital realms and Skype’s stuttery picture quality. We could live- Tweet an impossible wedding, full of web-famous cats and elaborately constructed ice monuments, keep the public guessing. We can make anything happen, Danger, including having a small ceremony with only our closest friends and relatives, and then do a larger reception or something. Let’s make it weird. Let’s make it ours.

Bug me always.

Love,

James

P.S. it was totally your idea for the Facebook event, but to be fair, I think you were joking, and then I made the actual event, also joking, and at some point, the joke got real… 114

115 Subject: RE: Save the Date From: Cindy ([email protected] To: Jess ([email protected])

Hey, Jess:

Cute invites. Doing that whole theater (or should I say “theatre”?) thing big, huh? Well, I doubt you’ll truly be surprised by this, but I don’t think I’ll make it. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a wedding, wasn’t expecting a groom, and in any case, wasn’t expecting an invite. Took me a while to turn the thing over and see your note. I mean, how long’s it been? Glad your shit seems to be falling into place. Thanks for the concern, and for acknowledging the weirdness. You and I both know your ideas about our relationship smoothly shifting gears to a “close, loving friendship” is probably idealistic at best. But hey, who knows? I do miss you as well, and someday I may just sneak up on you. Maybe I won’t be able to help myself. How much does this James character even know? I can just imagine him looking up from licking envelopes as you stuff them, saying: “What about that old friend of yours? What was her name again? Cindy?”

Fucking ironic, right? I know I broke it off, found a new person too soon, hurting you, causing pretty intense strife between us and all that shit, made it hard for you to move on, etc. And now it seems to be your turn, kinda returning the favor, right? Karma and all that. Well damn, I guess we as a “we” just fucking suck.

So, you asked. I hope it wasn’t empty courtesy. Because here I am answering: things are pretty rough. I won’t get into too much detail. But Buck and I failed miserably, not that that’s surprising, probably. Hell, even my mom saw that coming. I feel trapped here. I hate Tallahassee, I really really hate it. It’s too hot, too humid, too few people I connect with on any level, too few people with bookshelves, too much family. I think Buck might’ve even been the best of them out here, and he turned out to be a pretty epic piece of shit. I’m trying to get out, but things keep happening to drain my savings account. I’m feeling better-ish though. There’s been some progress on the medication. It’s not great, but makes things manageable.

Anyway. I hope this James knows what a catch he’s getting. I do miss you, but that’s a dangerous road. We both know that. I hope things go well, lovely ceremony and all that. I hope he’s good to you and you’re happy. Maybe we can try to be actual close, loving friends further down the line somewhere. I’m a little ragged right now. I’m sorry.

I have to say, seeing your handwriting, and your name on the return address… it brought up a lot of things. As did seeing that second name on the return address.

Okay. Best to you and James. I never know how to end emails. Sincerely? Yours? Fuck it…

Love, Cindy 116 GUEST BOOK

Dearest friends and family, please take a minute of your time to type your name(s) here on this typewriter. This will, as the heading above suggests, function as our guest book. If you are a stickler for spelling and grammar, take care [ominous music] ;) Typing a winky face with this thing feels super surreal...

Please feel free to include a short message or even just a thank you to James’ father for the early wedding present; this is his old typewriter, and he even sprung for a new ribbon!

NAME(S) NOTES

Richard & Molly Ferris I see you’re putting the old Underwood to goood use (crap, an error, already!) Looks good though.

Rachel Ackerman I can’t believe you’re making me type! What am I, your secretary?? Took me 5 minutes, Jeez... Jokez. Adding Zs to random words on a typewriter also feels weird...

Devon Lockhart Cool idea. Who’s to blame, James buddy, or is you’re your handy work, Jessica?

Aaron Daniels Hey sis, you gonna use thisto type your Broadway hit? & Melissa Valdez Congrats by the way.

Glen & Ann Daniels Very cool idea, dear, we love you, and James. Congratualtions! ~ Ann

Still not crazy about “Danger,” but it does add some flare I suppose. I’ll think of you as a Daniels always ~ Dad

Cousin Ronny Guess I should clarify? James’ cousin Ronny. Congrats!

Ellis Finley Well, now I feel obligated to typ a note...

END PAGE 1 of EPIC TYPEWRITTEN GUEST BOOK

117

The Wedding Reception of Jessica Danger and James Ferris

Sunday, July 14, 2013 Historic Taft Theatre Cincinnati, OH

Prologue: Charming and Classy Welcome from Jessica Danger and James Ferris

ACT I: Abridged Presentation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, with special guest appearance by Jessica Danger

ACT II: Dancing on the Stage fueled by Open Bar and Appetizers, featuring DJ Devon on the tunes, dance solo from the extraordinary James Ferris

ACT III: Dinner in the Lobby with bubbly and impromptu (prepared) toasts

ACT IV: CAKE!!

Epilogue: Gracious, Grateful, and Unhurried Bidding of Adieus from Jessica Danger and James Ferris

118

119

120 Subject: Holy Crap, It’s a Girl!! From: [email protected] To: [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Hey, everybody:

Sorry for the mass email, sorry for forgetting people if I forgot people. Please forward as you see fit, and I’m sure I or James will be talking to all of you soon individually. And apologies for using the word “Crap” in the subject line and befouling your pristine inboxes.

But, you know, pretty big news we wanted to share: she’s here! Crap See attached photos.

Cynthia Zadie Danger-Ferris, popped out at 11:43 P.M yesterday, 8 lbs 11 oz.

She’s healthy and everything went fine, I survived (In case you couldn’t tell), and we’re thrilled and relieved.

Again, see attached photos, and please don’t worry about baby shower stuff or anything (that means you, too, grandparents: Richard and Molly, you guys especially). If you have hand-me-downs you’d like to donate, that we can talk about.

Cynthia says hi; she just woke up, and is screeching like a banshee, so I better go.

Love you all!

Jessica & James (by proxy)

121 Cindy Texts

122

123 Overhead Perspective

Jessica looks up from the typewriter and sees that her daughter, Cynthia, is no longer in the grass under the tree in their backyard. Jessica is not worried; she knowingly looks up, and Cyn is there, lost in branches, blue eyes startling among the broad green leaves of the maple. Cynthia sits astride the lowest, widest branch, watching the red fluttering hops of a cardinal below, seeming lost in thought. Cynthia is not technically allowed to climb the tree—James’ rule—but Jessica finds her in the branches often, glancing out through the sliding glass door, when it’s not raining, when James isn’t home. She’s a girl who wants to see things expanding out under her, seeing the tops of things when other people see only their sides. And Jessica lets her, pretending she doesn’t see, a small smile forming on her lips. Jessica wonders what the cardinal’s path looks like from Cynthia’s vantage, how it differs from Jessica’s. The cardinal flutters to the fence, and Jessica’s eyes follow. The bird almost seems to pose there on the fence post, unmoving, staring off into the middle distance. Jessica’s mind wanders to the post card from Cindy that arrived three weeks ago now: a picture of a cardinal against bare branches, “Ohio” in yellow script at the top. The postcard saying Cindy will be in Ohio soon. Staying for a week, she said. A friend of a friend lives up here now, with a guest room. Seeing the sights, she said. Hoping to reconnect, she said. And then of course there was Jess’s realization that very morning, when she checked her phone and saw the date, that “soon” had arrived yesterday. Cindy, Jess thinks, is the type of person who would stubbornly climb a backyard maple, rules or no rules. Jessica blinks, shakes her head. She feels her heart racing, the familiar feeling of her mind untethered, going where it’s not supposed to. She reverts to default: physical objects, props placed just so. The typewriter in front of her on the dining room table is an affectation, something she uses because it was a wedding gift from James’ father, and it seems like the sort of thing she should be excited to use. Fulfillment of expectations. The act of writing, too, she worries, may be only affect these days—a worry she examines regularly at night lying beside James and also usually fails to shove aside in daylight— 124 and so she finds herself looking up again, finding Cynthia and watching her rather than typing. She wonders about Cynthia’s thoughts, what her brain does in that tree, with the aerial view of the cardinal’s movements, the house, the back-fence neighbors’ yard, the world. Whatever goes on behind those blue eyes—blue inherited from James—is surely more interesting than wrestling with a screenplay that’s going nowhere. Jessica removes the barely-typed-on sheet from the platen, and crumples it, misses the recycling bin with her toss. The screenplay is James’ idea: more commercially viable than stage plays and pretentious performance pieces, he says. She’s in her mid-thirties—shit not even “mid,” forty is just around the corner (Jesus, how did that happen?)—and has “outgrown” the coffeehouse open mics, he says. She must become an artistic pragmatist, whose delusions have matured to less delusional delusions. Jessica smiles at her little mental tongue twister. Not really a tongue twister though, she thinks, and searches for a better word, doesn’t find one, and gives up. Cyn would probably come up with some cute idiosyncrasy in a heartbeat: tongue tumble, word web, mouth maze. She’s inherited her mother’s appreciation for consonance. Jessica looks at the clock hanging in the kitchen. Still almost an hour until James would wobble in after a tiring day at his pragmatic, productive, fulfilling job. Time enough. In a half hour, Jessica will get up and tap the glass of the sliding door on her way to the kitchen to begin dinner. She won’t look out, will feign ignorance, keeping the shared fiction alive—Cynthia will slide off the branch, dangle by her arms, drop the remaining few feet gracefully, and act as if she was never illicitly in the branches. And Jessica, smiling, will of course remain none the wiser. But now, Jessica feeds a new sheet onto the paper table, twists the platen knob, and begins typing. The only thing she consistently writes, and feels she writes at all well anymore, is Cynthia: small futures expanding out under her fingers, and most of them sad in some way. Quiet little ten-minute plays or snippets of scenes, heavy on stage direction. Cynthia’s dog (James always tells her she can have one when she’s older) might die, say, slowly from cancer, while Cynthia spends afternoons after school lying beside him, staring out at the back yard, stroking the pronounced ridges of his spine, whispering in his ear. “There’s the neighbor’s cat, walking the fence line,” she’d say. “When you get better, she won’t dare,” and she’d scowl at the cat in his stead. Flashback to when she named him Barkimedes one morning, telling Jessica her decision offhand, spoon full of milk and cereal poised before her lips, after learning to measure the volume of irregular objects the previous day in science class. 125 Flashforward to solemnly digging a hole beneath the maple. Jessica with the shovel, glancing at Cynthia as she digs. Cynthia’s face flat and impossible to read. Curtain. Jessica’s eyes sometimes grow damp as she types. All the plays or scenes are first drafts. When they’re finished, in all their roughness, she carefully folds the sheets of paper in half and places them between pages of the half-read copies of literary magazines by her side of the bed. She doesn’t show them to James. Sometimes she reads the dialogue to herself in bed at night while James snores, her lips moving silently with the words, and in the morning James tells her she’s left her lamp on all night again, would she please remember to turn it off, the electricity bill. Jessica keeps only the sad scenes. With the half hour she has left before she puts the rice on to boil, Jessica begins writing a future with a boy, and though it makes her slightly uncomfortable to think of her nine-year-old’s first kiss coming so young, she lets the scene go where it may. She imagines Cynthia being the one to lean gradually closer and lightly touch her lips to his. Or maybe the boy would be a girl. Is Cynthia’s short hair at age nine significant (“Mom,” she said, “shorter,” each time Jessica began to put down the scissors)? And what of her favorite jeans, baggy with a hole in the knee? Her eyes flick from the page to Cynthia outside on her branch, the light brown pixie cut and the sap-covered hands gripping the bark. Jessica can’t seem to puzzle it, can’t seem to remember what she herself had been thinking and feeling at age nine, what clothes she’d preferred. Jessica’s mother never would have gone for hair as short as Cynthia’s, but did she long for shorter hair? She can’t remember. Everything in her brain seems so muddled these days. Cynthia’s short hair makes Jessica feel proud; she often musses it as Cynthia passes, like she used to see her father muss her brother’s hair. In another scene she wrote earlier that month, the boys in Cynthia’s class at school made faces, calling her tomboy, pushing her books from her arms and kicking them down the hall. But Cynthia never tattled, never cried to teachers or the principle, and when she finally told her mother, it was calmly: “I feel kind of bad for them.” In the scene, Jessica glowed with pride, and the Jessica writing the scene, too, felt her chest swell, and she rose and plucked Cynthia from the couch to loud protests, upsetting the book she was reading, and swung her around and embraced her. In the scene she’s writing now, with the kiss, she begins alternating pronouns mid-scene, the boy sitting next to Cynthia becomes a girl becomes a boy, continues to fluctuate. She adds 126 stage direction about androgynous attire, hair, makeup, possible two-face like split down the actor’s middle? The girl-or-boy giggles. The boy-or-girl initiates the second kiss, and Cynthia coyly turns her head and catches the encroaching lips with a cheek. The kiss itself, Jessica thinks as she removes the filled page, feels real. She can sense that Cynthia’s first kiss will not wait for a post-midnight quad in her fifth year as an undergrad; that at least she can sense. Jess remembers a night with Cindy, asking each other about firsts. Cindy saying her first kiss had come at age ten. Jessica closes her eyes for a moment, reverts to physical objects. She opens them: there’s the solid wood surface of the table, the ream of paper resting in the middle. There’s the page she just filled to the left of the typewriter. She feeds a new page onto the platen. On this page, the boy-or-girl’s parent catches the pair in a third kiss, and cuffs him-or-her on the ear, grabs a wrist to drag the poor child home, turning and yelling at Cynthia, losing all control, screaming, calling her a whore. Cynthia watches, her features inscrutable. Curtain. Jessica is sure a psychiatrist would have a field day with the dark or sad turns these imagined scenes of her daughter’s life take. She herself can’t quite say why these fictions invariably seem to trend downhill. Maybe it’s prophylactic: if she writes it, it’s less likely to occur. Maybe it’s preparatory, in case it should indeed occur. In any case, her scenes are not something she feels she can share, with anyone. Little closet dramas. When she removes the second page and looks at the clock, she sees the thirty minutes she gave herself to write have come and gone. James will be home soon, and he won’t comment on dinner getting started a little later than usual, though she’s sure he’ll notice and consciously refrain from comment, and silently pat himself on the back for his heroic and generous self- control. She looks out at the back yard and sees that prescient Cynthia has divined the time as well, is already dangling from the branch, about ready to drop, and Jessica smiles her private smile. After sliding the typed pages in the latest New Yorker, she rinses some rice, adds the water, a hunk of butter, some salt, and sets the burner on the stove to high. She’s covering the boiling pot and reducing the heat when the sliding glass door squeals open and Cynthia bounds in. Her jeans are scuffed from the bark, Jessica notes, and there’s a fresh sap stain on last year’s soccer jersey she’s wearing, which she tries to hide as she rushes through the kitchen and down the hall to her room. 127 “What was that on your shirt, dear?” Jessica calls, halving a bell pepper at the cutting board. She hears Cynthia’s door shut without reply, but she imagines Cyn smiling cunningly as she changes before her father gets home. She chops the pepper and an onion, and looks sadly at the half a zucchini left in the produce bag. Onion, pepper, and zucchini had been her staples, included in almost every meal when zucchini was in season. But James can’t stand the texture. “Too rubbery,” he says. Only whenever James is out for the evening does she include the squash. Thank god Cynthia hasn’t inherited her father’s taste buds. She checks the rice through the glass lid, judges it’s still a good half hour out, and returns to the table, packing the typewriter into its case. She leafs through the New Yorker, reading the cartoons, chuckling occasionally. She’s trying to decipher one she doesn’t understand when she hears simultaneously James’ key in the front door and her phone buzzing on the table with an incoming message. She picks up the phone; it’s from Cindy: “Jess, are you free tonight? Got into town yesterday. Coffee? Tea? Drinks and a show? :)” James enters, habitually stamping his feet on the mat, and leans around the corner so he can see Jessica standing at the dining room table. “Hey there, Danger,” he says with a tired smile, as he removes his sport coat. Jess is feeling Cindy’s text message in her sternum: “Coffee? Tea? Drinks and a Show?” Jessica looks up and says, “Hey, JamesDear.” He removes his shoes. “Working on the screenplay?” he asks, nodding to the typewriter case on the table. “How’s it coming?” “Fits and starts,” Jessica says. The phone is still in her hand, weighing it down. “But I managed to crank out another page or two.” She moves to the kitchen, picks up the wad of paper she tossed, and feeds it to the recycling bin. “Well that’s great,” he says, moving through the living room and coming up behind her as she checks the stove, “I’m proud of you.” He wraps her in a hug and kisses the top of her head. Jessica forces a smile. She can’t keep herself from thinking how much she hates it when he does that, how it makes her feel shorter than she is, like a child again, barely waist high. “How was work?” she asks.

128 James begins talking about a big accounting error that everyone is hearing about from the higher ups, how Bill across the hall is constantly tired with the new baby and making stupid mistakes, and Jessica’s attention fades. While he’s talking, she replies to Cindy’s text: “Let’s go with option 3. Say around 9?” Cynthia’s door opens quickly with a singing creak of hinges, and she runs into the kitchen to give her father a hug. She’s in fresh jeans and a new t-shirt, hair bouncing on her head, looking every bit the little girl she still is. As James catches her in his arms and twirls her, Jessica catches the soft bite of sap in the air, still clinging to Cyn’s hands.

*

“I’m going out for a while with Rachel,” Jessica says, poking her head into the study, where James has been since dinner. “Might go late.” James is bent over his desk, staring intently at two pages he’s holding side-by-side. “Okay,” he says. “Try not to make it too late or run up too high a tab this time. I know how you guys can get.” He hasn’t looked up. “Sure, I’ll give it a try,” Jessica says, shifting in the doorway to bring the low-cut black dress she’s wearing into view, turns her head revealing the carefully mussed and pinned bun she’s spent a half hour crafting and re-crafting in front of the bathroom mirror. James does not look up. “Goodnight,” she says, “in case I don’t get in before you go to bed.” James grunts, and she shuts the door and moves down the hall. She knocks at Cynthia’s door and opens it. Cyn is lying on her stomach on the floor, sketch pad open in front of her, colored pencils scattered on the carpet, feet idly kicking in the air. She’s drawing a bird’s eye view of a cardinal in grass, wings mid-flutter. “I’m heading out, Cyn,” Jessica says. “Have a good night, and I’ll see you in the morning.” Cynthia looks up, grinning. “Night, Mom! Hey,” her eyebrows rise, “you look pretty.” “Thank you, sweetie.” Jessica kneels down beside her and gives her a peck on the cheek. She picks up the sketch pad and admires the drawing: shaded, slightly stylized beyond strict realism, brilliantly colored. “This is gorgeous,” she says. “You’ll be filling galleries in no time.” “Someday,” Cynthia says with a coy half-smile. 129 Jessica gives her a hug and stands up. “Okay, don’t stay up too late.” She moves to the door, turns. “And tell your father goodnight when you’re ready for bed.” Cynthia nods. She has returned to the cardinal, darkening the red of the wings. Out in the car, Jess texts Cindy, saying she’s on her way. She had decided on a bar in Over the Rhine that has free live music almost nightly, not too near, not too far. The bands never start on time, so she and Cindy would have plenty of time to talk before the bar became too sonically dense for thought. And then, if they wanted to stay for the music they could. The night would progress as it would, possibilities expanding out under the star-filled sky. She is driving. Central Parkway stretches. She has plenty of time to think, and wishes she could figure out what she’s thinking. Her brain seems to be emitting some sort of sub-lingual static that encompasses everything inexpressible in the fact that in ten minutes, she will again see Cindy, her face, be in the same physical space as Cindy, will be simultaneously the same Jess and an entirely different Jess in front of an utterly familiar and completely unrecognizable Cindy. Her thoughts hiccup, retreat. Passing MLK, she finds she is simply dumbfounded that the word “adjectival” exists, that it describes and is the thing it describes as the same time. Liberty, Walnut, 13th, Main. She passes the bar, people wander sidewalks, every parking space is full of automobile. She turns down a side street. She circles. Liberty, Walnut, 13th, Main. She has calmed down. A car pulls out, she pulls in. The bar is just ahead across the street. James is at their house, in his office. Cynthia is drawing. Cindy is just ahead across the street. Jess is in her car. Then she is in front of the bar, the man at the door waves her through not checking her I.D., people everywhere are speaking in various pitches of non-sobriety. “Jess.” The single syllable feels like jumping in a cold lake in the midst of a sweltering summer afternoon. It almost knocks the air from her lungs. Eyes, nose, lips, ears. These observable details are as Jess remembers. The voice seems slightly deeper. Her hair is shorter, bobbed, still wafts lavender in a halo. Her smile shatters any hope of language from Jess’s lips. They are standing. It is only natural that they should embrace, two friends who haven’t seen each other, beyond the infrequent, low-res Skype screen (and that was years ago), in almost a decade. Cindy is the one who moves. Jess feels Cindy’s bra strap through her shirt, feels

130 Cindy’s hair against her cheek, feels the way their bodies have aged in complimentary ways so that they seem to harmonize, like two halves of a broken thing. They part and sit and stare. Cindy breaks the silence: “Clearly, we need drinks. I’m buying.” They stand and move to the bar. Cindy, in simple t-shirt and jeans, attracts the bartender’s attention in no time.

*

“Jesus, Jess. You’ve managed to turn into a fifties housewife while I wasn’t looking. Chef, maid, and mother, and a husband who brings home the bacon. What the hell happened?” They have been summarizing the past three years since their last real phone conversation. Jess finishes her beer. “Most days, I have no idea.” “You know, you’ve gushed your head off about Cynthia, but you haven’t said more than a few words about James.” “And?” “Nothing, just an observation. It just makes me wonder is all.” “You’ve said almost nothing about Buck.” “Sure, but Buck and I split up ages ago. That’s different” Jess leans back and watches the musicians setting up amps and drums and guitars. “I’ll get us another round,” she says, and gets up without waiting for a reply. “It’s just,” Cindy says when Jess returns, and sighs. “I’m going to be blunt: I don’t think you know why you’re even with James. That’s the feeling I get.” “What the fuck, Cindy, you’re one to talk. Where’s your soul mate? Why are you single now? What did you ever see in Buck? At least mine has a halfway decent name.” Cindy laughs. “Okay, well, no arguments there. Doesn’t change anything, though.” Jess deflates. “It doesn’t. I don’t know what I think, I don’t know what I feel, I don’t know why anything that ever happens happens, except that it seems right at the time, to someone. Why did Cindy and Jess become Cindy and Buck in the first place?” Cindy rotates the glass in front of her. “Do you want an answer?” “It was mostly rhetorical.” 131 “Well, it’s something I’ve thought about endlessly of late. I’ll say, if you want. Just— don’t hate me.” “I don’t hate you.” Cindy pauses, seems to search Jess for meaning. Then she relaxes, looks down at her hands clasped around her glass. “Proximity, I think,” she says. “A warm body. A present body. I know it’s terrible. But you became an idea, an abstraction, and he was a reality, and then he was the best thing I had in Florida, the only good thing it seemed like, and he was sweet and selfless and understanding. In the beginning at least. It felt—tangible, comfortable.” Jess’s breath feels caught in her throat. She brings her glass to her mouth, tries to swallow. “Well?” Cindy says. “Say something.” “Yes.” Jessica gulps air. “It’s just—. It sucked. It killed me. But I know that feeling. ‘Comfortable.’ I know that phrase, ‘in the beginning at least.’ My mouth has formed those words.” She feels like the levee will break any minute, she feels pressure building in her chest, she blinks her eyes rapidly. “Jesus Christ, Cin, thirty minutes with you and I’m about to start bawling.” “Shit, I’m sorry.” “Do you ever get the feeling that it’s all a joke? That the idea that things are supposed to ‘work out’ in any certain way is this huge cultural delusion? That we’re all walking around half- concussed on delusion?” “All the time. You put it better than my brain ever did, though.” They sit in silence. One of the band members, a woman, girl really, with green hair and torn clothes picks up a guitar and sends a few dissonant notes like shockwaves through the amplifier. Jess thinks of Cynthia, wonders if she’ll ever join a punk band. “What are we doing, Cin?” Jess asks. “Why are you here?” “I missed you. I’ve missed you a long time. Text messages are nice and all, but it’s not the same.” “I missed you too.” “I’m selfish, Jess. I’m selfish and I miss you, and I wanted to see what seeing you again would do.” “And? What did it do?” 132 “It feels good, it hurts, it’s different and familiar. I don’t know. It’s confusing. I feel like every decision I’ve ever made has been the wrong one.” “Including coming here?” “Probably. Shit, I don’t know. What’s it like for you? Why are you here? You’re the one who has things to lose.” Jess takes a drink and thinks. She lied to James about where she was going tonight. If one of her characters in her plays had done that, what else could her motivations possibly be? “I’m not happy,” she says. “Sometimes I think part of me never left us. I think I wanted to see if you might be a way out.” Cindy stares at the table. Jess can see the tension bunching the muscles in Cindy’s forearms as she rotates her glass. “And part of me knows I’m idealizing us,” Jess says. “And there’s Cynthia, of course. I don’t know. I’m lost, I’m a mess. I write little plays about her.” Cindy looks up, holds her eyes, smiles a sad smile. “Nothing new there. Being a mess and writing. Though, I guess the daughter thing makes it all different.” Jess lets out a laugh like a balloon popping. “Right.” They finish their drinks in tandem. Jess looks at her watch. “Right. God, I’m sorry, I should probably go.” “No, that’s okay, I kinda figured you’d have to get back.” They stand, embrace. “Or at least I prepared myself for that possibility. But I’m in town all week. Call me, okay? It was really great to see your face again.” “It was,” Jess says. “Really great. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

*

Jessica gets in her car, but she doesn’t go home. She doesn’t go anywhere for a while, she just sits. Cars go by on Main, headlights spraying over everything. People younger than her drift between the fenced area out front and the bar proper for cigarettes; she can hear the dull chattering through her closed windows. New young people cut through the passing cars to enter before the show starts. She starts the car and begins driving, not exactly homeward, not exactly in any direction. She finds herself on Queen City Ave. She’s lived in Cincinnati almost twelve—thirteen?—years, 133 and she’s never been out this way, through the viaduct and over the train depot, eventually passing beyond the reach of commercial buildings and apartment complexes into more residential neighborhoods, then under street lights crowded by trees on either side so that she almost feels she’s left the city entirely. Houses begin to appear, and the illusion falters, apartment buildings, she’s lost her bearings entirely. She takes a left at the next street light, passes a church. The sign, lit from ground lights, reads “FAITH IS PERSONAL BUT NEVER PRIVATE.” She drives past what could almost pass for a medieval guard turret towering above the trees. She leans forward to follow it skyward through the windshield. She wishes she could be up there, with a bird’s-eye view, seeing the city expanding out under her. She wishes she could Google Map her life. Eventually, she crests a shallow hill and again finds gas stations and tire discounters and abandoned-looking used car lots. There’s a place called “RUG RATT Learning Center” and suddenly her mind is full of Cynthia, thinking how, even at nine, she’d be critical of that extra “T,” maybe even use the word “superfluous.” Her vocabulary is growing by leaps and bounds. Jessica thinks how Rachel sometimes calls the city “Cincinn.” She wonders if telling James she was meeting Rachel was stupid, whether she’ll be caught in the lie, and if everything will explode around her. Cincinn. Her mind contorts it to “Cyn-Cin.” Jessica doesn’t notice when she starts smiling, but she’s smiling like she can’t control her lips or face at all, as she comes to another light and sees a Wal-Mart Super Center on the left. And then her turn signal is clicking and then her hands are guiding her car into the turn lane and into the sparsely populated parking lot. In all her nine years, Jessica has never been to a Wal- Mart here, only occasionally at her Grandma’s request back in Oregon, when Grandma was still alive. Cynthia has never set foot in one. Jessica is out of her car and the automated doors open for her, and she’s inside, a gust of synthetic wind blows her hair in her face, she runs her fingers through it, squints under the fluorescent lighting. She notices she’s no longer smiling, but now feels a slight frown tugging her brows. She’s lost all control of herself, she thinks. Cyn Cin James Cyn, she thinks. And Jessica in there somewhere. She turns slowly reading the signs hanging from the ceiling announcing their respective departments. She imagines Cynthia up in the exposed rafters, draped over a beam like she does in the tree branch, seeing the store and shoppers from above. Jessica feels she’s looking for something. She begins to move past the cosmetics toward housewares, wandering slowly, gazing 134 at items on the shelves. At the end of the aisle—fluffy towels in pastels her hand instinctively reaches out to touch—she turns and proceeds down the next one with curtain rods. She isn’t sure what she’s looking for: maybe something in the toys, maybe a dehumidifier for the dampness in the basement, maybe a sturdier suitcase. Maybe a meaningless everyday-low-priced thing. She isn’t sure what she’s looking for, but she isn’t lost here. She can wander the store, aisle by aisle, all night if she has to. The benefits of 24-hour access. She isn’t sure what she’s looking for, but she knows she’ll know it when she sees it.

END

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