ALONE IN A ROOM TOGETHER:

STORIES I WANT TO TELL YOU

By

Jennifer L. Napolitano

Submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Fine Arts

In

Creative Writing

Chair: (/ fJ /'J ') 4~ -v(. f1-·----G-- Richard McCann

Dean of the College

2009

American University

Washington, D.C. 20016

AMER~AN UNIVE~.SITY UBPJ\RY qiQlO UMI Number: 1466037

Copyright 2009 by Napolitano, Jennifer L.

All rights reserved

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by

Jennifer L. Napolitano

2009

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother. ALONE IN A ROOM TOGETHER:

STORIES I WANT TO TELL YOU

BY

Jennifer L. Napolitano

ABSTRACT

Alone in a Room Together is a collection of original short fiction and nonfiction.

Each piece, like each character, is independent, but linked thematically to the rest of the collection through isolation, grief, and obsession. The characters presented deal with events as seminal as unrequited love and the deaths of family members, finding the most difficult part ofloss to be the failure to connect to and communicate with even their closest confidants. As a line is drawn between what is said and what is unsaid, these stories attempt to present a simple truth: all people, no matter how much they are loved or surrounded by others, go through the world alone.

11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I did not go through this alone.

I owe so very many thanks to Richard McCann for his encouragement to write what was hard and be brutal in revisions - it's been a religious experience.

I owe just as many thanks to Mary Kay Zuravleff for coming to my thesis rescue, for caring about my work, for MKZ interpretations and hookers on the wall.

I've been blessed to have such wonderful workshop leaders in my time here at

American. I'd like to thank Kermit Moyer for valuing my point of view; E.J. Levy for encouraging intelligence; Andrew Holleran for his enthusiasm; and especially Denise

Orenstein for diner napkins, puppies, tiaras, and keeping the tension on the page. I have no words for all the love and gratitude I feel towards you all.

I am forever grateful to Tim Napolitano, who never thought a writer was a silly thing for his daughter to be.

I would also like to thank my sisters, Erin and Sarah Napolitano, for keeping me anchored to my past.

Nearly every member of the faculty, staff, or graduate programs in the

Department of Literature these past three years has touched my life in some way. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being my readers, my critics, and most importantly, my friends.

111 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii

STORIES:

WAITING ...... 1

WHAT GOOD FEELS LIKE ...... 9

ACTING ...... 17

WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU ...... 28

A RECIPE FOR BANANA BREAD ...... 35

JOURNEYS ...... 41

PENNY AND THE END OF THE WORLD ...... 51

THORNS ...... 64

FLOW ...... 66

ROCK GATE ...... : ...... 68

HAIR ...... 78

STAINED ...... ··.···· ...... 87

STRANGERS ...... 89

THE ANSWER IS NOWHERE ...... 104

IV WAITING

We waited in the next room while our mother died. I knew it was going to happen that day, because she was alive in my mind, just floating around with me. She was there from the minute I woke up, as I put on a bra and some deodorant, washed my

face and brushed my teeth, pulled my hair back and tried to wipe the appearance of

exhaustion from 'Under my eyes. She was with me when I fell into the seat of my car and drove for five miles before I realized I didn't have the radio on. She was there as the

automatic doors to the hospital opened, as I breathed in the smell of sick people and stale coffee, as I stepped off the elevator onto the hospice floor.

Same routine as always, no recognition of my senses; she hovered over me the entire time, jerking me awake and dehydrating me, draining me of any remaining emotions, sucking the life out of my soul the way the cancer was sucking the life out ()f her body.

The morphine had pushed her into a coma two days before, and we were just waiting. I knew she hadn't died in the night, notjust because the phone hadn't rung, but because she just hadn't. If you live inside someone's body for nine months, you know when she's dead and when she's not. She was with me, thickly. I could feel her in the circles under my eyes - so dark they looked like bruises. I could feel her in the grease and sweat that stuck to the fold of my elbow. In the way I didn't have the energy to bathe, the energy to do anything really but wallow in my own grief. It was like her dying was the lens through which I saw the world in those weeks. The lens clouded my vision, but disappeared when I looked in the mirror. And if there was any doubt in my

1 2 mind, I knew she was still alive when I walked into the waiting room and saw my brother

John, and saw that her life and death were still weighing on him. If she were still alive,

something in his presence would have changed.

The hospice floor, unlike the rest of the hospital, allowed visitors twenty-four hours, and I could tell John hadn't gone home the night before. The TV was still on, and the local morning news was beginning. John never watches the news. He'd been watching late-night comedy five hours before and hadn't remembered to turn the damn

thing off.

"Hey," I said, kicking his foot out of the way so I could step to the chair beside him. I waved the remote in his face and shut off the TV.

"Yeah, sure," he said, and grinned. Then he shook the smile off his face, wrinkled his eyebrows, and looked down into his lap. Over the two months since she'd been admitted, and specifically in the past week, our bodies had begun reflecting emotions we weren't experiencing, simply because we weren't experiencing any emotions at all. We'd smile when we didn't feel happy, because what we felt was numb.

We'd nod when we didn't feel positive, because what we felt was unsure. John knew I didn't care that he smiled, but he looked down to express shame, because what he really felt was nothing.

"What were you watching?" I asked.

"What? Oh, I don't know."

"It's 6:00 in the morning. Conan ended four hours ago." 3

"Well, I don't know," he shrugged. "I guess I was watching whatever came on

after that."

"You probably watched infomercials all night and didn't even know it." I laughed, even though what I'd said wasn't funny, and I slapped my hand on his knee even though I didn't want him to react.

He nodded and turned to face me, but his eyes suddenly widened and he let out a

small yelp. "Oh, Cassie. I thought you were Tina this whole time. I didn't even look at you."

I'd forgotten how to laugh genuinely, so what came out of me was more of an amused wail. This noise, filtered through the white noise of my mother hanging around my head, came out of concern for John's ability to carry on a conversation without knowing who was talking to, out of knowing Tina and I looked nothing alike, and for knowing our twenty-two-year-old sister Tina couldn't get out of bed that early in the morning even while her mother was dying.

"Do you need anything?" I asked, standing.

"I'm good. Coffee, later, maybe. If you get the chance."

Mom was weighing on John as I left the room. He rubbed his left shoulder and stretched both arms before slumping back in his chair and shifting to find a more comfortable position. His gray eyes went from vacant to stormy in the second I turned to look at him, then he was gone just as quickly. He was done, giving up, the same way

Mom was, the same way all the relatives that stopped coming around after four weeks had already. 4

John was stationary during most of his visits. He'd go and get food, if we were too tired, or he'd sit by Mom's bed, ifhe felt inspired to. And he tried to be the responsible adult and talk to the nurses and doctors, but I needed to be in the room whenever he did that because he never had any recollection of those conversations.

Mostly, I'd say about eight hours of each day, he sat in the same chair, repositioning himself as need be and talking to anyone who started speaking to him. He never initiated conversations and I don't think he'd be able to tell you the color of the wall he stared at every day that summer.

It was pale green. Like a psychiatrist's office or backstage at a seedy rock venue.

John and I were both teachers, so we were lucky, we said, lucky that the worst of it started in June. June 14. We were in the middle of August now, and I'd known since the middle of August that she'd be gone by the time we had to get back to work. Tina had just finished college and was living off her newly-kicked-in trust fund, which was fine considering the circumstances, but she'd have done it anyway.

All the while that money she lived off was in the back of my mind, that money put into trust by her father, a man who married my mother and lived with us for seven years, dying when Tina was six, the funds a surprise to everyone but Mom until Tina turned twenty-one, the physical proof he had never cared for John or I nearly as much as his real child.

I clenched my fists in the pockets of my black hoodie and stretched out the fabric the way my kindergarteners do. I thought about them as I paused at the nurses' station, about how I'd rather be wiping snotty noses than keeping my mother's corpse company. 5

"Good morning, Cassie. How are you?" a nurse asked as she flipped through

some papers. Sheila, her name was. Linda? Maybe.

"Hey," I said, and kept walking.

I stopped in my mother's doorway.

"Someone has to be here," John had said for the last few nights, though he never made me feel guilty for not staying. And he rarely went into her room alone; when he

said someone had to be "here," he meant on the floor, in the hospital, nearby. Not holding her hand or listening to the breathing she wasn't conscious enough know was painful.

Tina would usually stay with him for an hour or so, just long enough for me to go home and give them one last call before falling asleep. She was the one trying to make me feel guilty, or she just wanted me to think she was responsible; I didn't care to figure it out. John is ten years older than Tina and I'm right in the middle, butthere was enough of an age difference between the two of them to make him look the other way when she did something wrong or acted spoiled.

The atmosphere in Mom's room carried with it a sense of hope I found offensive.

The walls were the same pale green as the waiting room, and the bed sheets were robin's egg blue. When the sun was shining we could all be tricked into thinking of spring. Of rebirth. I straightened up the "Get Well Soon" cards on the nightstand and rested my hand on Mom's hard, cold bald head. Even when she had fevers that summer, her head was always stone cold to the touch. 6

I pulled a chair closer, propped my feet up on the bed, and stared at her for a few moments, an hour, a year maybe, my lifetime. Staring at someone who wasn't there, conversing with a corpse, sitting in a room all alone.

I fell asleep, I think, or maybe I didn't; I can't remember. Eventually though I just left and headed down to check on John. On the way, I heard footsteps pounding up the stairwell and paused before the door clanged open. Tina jumped into the hallway, yawning and out of breath, and raised her brows as she made eye contact with me.

"Hey," she said. It was almost noon.

"Hey."

We said nothing further as we walked to the waiting room together. Tina crawled into the chair next to John and put her arms around his neck, resting her head on his shoulder. She'd been doing that since she was two, and that was the position I'd left them in the night before.

Mom's death affected Tina differently. It gave her a sense of purpose and made her feel like an adult. I could tell when she was fully conscious of the situation in the moments when she looked the most calm, the most composed. As she sat with her arms around John, she closed her eyes and curled her lips up in a grin. Mom didn't weigh on

Tina like she did John and I. She was more of a comforting presence, warming her from within and making her oblivious to anything going on outside of her own mind.

The three of us sat in silence for, well, God knows how long anymore. Other patients were in the wing. Other visitors came in and out. But Mom had been on the floor the longest and my siblings and I had become fixtures everyone else moved around, 7

like the mini-fridge or the coffee table. Things were happening in the room, but I could only focus on one sensation at a time - footsteps in the hallway one minute, the elevator

slowly beeping the next, the smell of orange juice, a shadow moving out of the

fluorescent light in the hallway.

"Where were you?" I finally asked. "You're usually here by ten."

"I got into an accident this morning," Tina said. "The car is finished. I had to take a cab here from the junkyard."

"What car?" I asked. "Mom's car?" As with the rest of my body, I had no control over the sound ofmy own voice, which was high-pitched and squeaky.

"I was totally tired. I just got slammed into in the middle of an intersection. I didn't see the light tum red."

Calmly now, I said, "You're going to have to pay for that."

"What's the point? We were going to have to sell it anyway; you said that last week."

"We would have gotten money from the sale, and now we won't, that's the point."

John turned his attention from the wall, suddenly realizing a conversation was taking place. "You got into an accident?" he asked, squeezing Tina's shoulder. "Why didn't you call me?"

"Someone had to be here; I didn't want you to leave."

"She wrecked the car." 8

"Are you okay?" John's face was unable to express concern, but he put his arm

around her mechanically.

"Yeah, look at her, she's fine. Where is the car now, Tina?"

I thought it was the accident, the concern for Tina, the concern for the car, making the John become self-aware. "Wait, where is the car? Wait, you totaled the car?" he asked, snapping into consciousness. "Mom's car? Did the airbags go off?"

Then my senses all began reacting simultaneously. I felt a breeze from the air conditioner, while at the same time my mouth went dry, I heard footsteps scurrying down the hall, squinted from a light flickering to shine brightly in my eye. I waved my hand to try to quiet John down. "Hang on, hang on, what's happening?"

"I was going to get the car anyway, because I needed one," Tina argued. "Fine, the car is dead. But it was going to be my car, so don't worry about it."

I jumped out of my seat but didn't get a step toward the door before Sheila walked m. John stood up next to me, and Tina followed. My awareness of Mom was leaving me. I was conscious of all things in the room. She was slipping away from me; the air conditioning blew the curtain away from the wall. Tina's fingers twitched. John hadn't eaten since the night before and I could hear his stomach start to rumble.

The nurse cracked her knuckles and twisted her ring around. "Hurry, come down the hall. The doctor's on his way."

No point, I thought. No point. Mom floated out the window and the three of us surfaced, gasping for air. WHAT GOOD FEELS LIKE

Earlier tonight I drove out to Dawn's new place, and now we're sitting on her new couch drinking that horrible blush wine she drinks, and it's as if we're finally adults, and

she's finally my friend again. She's making a new life for herself. She's experienced hardship now instead of everything coming easy to her. She's getting drunk, so I don't have to feel embarrassed for being a lightweight, for knowing two glasses is over my limit but doing it anyway. I appreciate her doing this. But I still sense that for us, for our friendship, there's been a switch, so that being friends means she tells me nothing, and I keep one small little secret, the closest thing I've had to a relationship in three years, all to myself. Like a dam, I'm filled with enough pressure and generating enough energy to light this whole town, and I'll never leak, because this distance is what I need.

I tell myself that Dawn needs it too, and that it makes sense for our friendship to be confined to this: two women, alone in a room together. That she doesn't want to know about my life and she doesn't really want to tell me about hers, and that we can talk about shoes and news and hair products but not men, and especially not sex. We met as two awkward eight-year-olds and we've held true to that ever since. I've made other friends and those are the people who taught me how to drink and how to curse and how to fuck, and Dawn has made other friends and I'm not sure what they've taught her.

We have no mutual friends anymore; the closest we had was James. She's telling me about the deal she got on this couch, the three separate stores she went to in search of it, and I'm nodding and half listening. In my head I'm rolling around a joke about how our friendship is like this wine: it doesn't get better with age, but she likes it, and I need

9 10 it. I feel pretty committed to making this joke work, and my mouth is open to say something when I realize maybe she doesn't think there's anything wrong with our friendship at all. In an alternate universe I'd ask her why we keep pretending to care about each other just because we once did, and I'd tell her about Ryan, and I'd tell her I can't tell her anymore because she and I don't talk about sex and the things he and I do would make her blush, or judge me, or both. I'd tell her I hate white zinfandel. Instead, in this universe:

"You should get a bigger TV."

"Why?"

"I feel like I could squash this one with my little toe."

"Well how about you try to not step on my TV and so we don't have that problem?"

"Didn't this used to be in the bedroom?"

"James took the flatscreen that was in the living room."

I swirl my wine, as she takes a sip of hers. Then she swirls, I sip. We get caught in the comfortable rhythm of silence patterned with more silence. Neither one of us says anything for several minutes.

"Do you want to help me put together the TV stand?" she finally asks.

Until she asks, I don't realize the TV has been sitting on a chair the whole time

I've been here. Do I want to help put together the TV stand? Not really. Can I stall by asking questions?

"What kind of stand is it?" 11

"Beech veneer, just the small kind with the two shelves underneath."

"All you need, I suppose."

"I got it at IKEA."

"It must be nice to be so close to IKEA now." Remember when you used to be close to museums and theaters? And your job? And me?

I met Ryan when I was out with James, six months ago, when Dawn was out of town because they were beginning to have problems. As soon as James put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Chrissy, man, it's not gonna work out. I've gotta leave her," I began scanning the bar for a guy, any guy I could throw myself at so James wouldn't throw himself at me. I can never remember too much of that night, that place. That place had a different name before, and it has a different name now, but I don't remember any of the past names and I don't care to know the current name. All I remember is shot after shot of Cuervo sliding down my throat, my hair falling down around my shoulders, my back pressed into the curvy edge of the bar. His hand struggling to find the opening between my shirt and my skin, its rough texture in contrast to the silky way it slid up over my torso towards my bra. I thought he was charming.

"Do you want to see the new sheets I bought?" Dawn asks.

With any of my other friends, even with James, I'd make a joke about this question. I'd wiggle my eyebrows and tell her she doesn't have to work so hard to get me into bed. But Dawn and I don't make these jokes, and I doubt she'd even understand 12

I was joking. Instead I ask if she got the sheets at IKEA. She says Macy's. We set down our wine glasses. I follow her into the bedroom.

Before she moved she'd described the color green she wanted to paint the walls of her new bedroom, since it was her own bedroom this time and James had always hated green, that pale green that goes with lavender so well. I told her I'd help. We were excited for a day of painting. She said she'd call me when she was ready.

Tonight, when I see the room for the first time, the walls are already pale green.

The furniture is perfectly in place.

"When did you paint?"

"Oh, last weekend."

"I like this shade of green."

Dawn beams. "Thanks!"

I can't ask her why she didn't wait for me, as I'm beginning to think I imagined the whole conversation, our whole friendship. Instead: "It goes really well with the lavender bedspread."

She smiles at me as if this is a brand-new subject we've never discussed before.

"They're 600 thread count. Aren't they soft?"

I run my hand over a comer of the top sheet. The sheets are bunched in the middle of the bed, the pillows built up around them in a semi-circle. The bed isn't made, but only one side is untucked. I don't have to play detective to know Dawn's been sleeping alone, but the scene gives this information away anyway. No wonder James always hated this color. It goes so well with lavender you just have to pair them together. 13

It looks like Dawn designed this for a six-year-old girl. No man would ever sleep in this bedroom.

I fold the sheet over, crumble a section of it with my fist and smooth it back out.

"Thread count. I never know what that means."

She runs her palm flat over the other side of the bed. "Me neither, but I know higher is good. So this must be what good feels like."

I laugh. She laughs. I ask if there is more wine. We leave the sad bedroom.

· Ryan lives in Baltimore, just far enough away for us to feel greatly inconvenienced at the prospect of visits, but we talk on the phone at least once a week.

Every couple of weeks, we get together to screw around or get drunk or both. He rolls over and falls asleep right after he finishes. He can't fall asleep with anything in his face, he once told me. Anyone, he quickly corrected himself. He makes sure to make me come first.

On the phone it's different. I can take my time. He tells me where and how to touch myself, but I decide how hard. He listens to me moan and then he comes. I tell him how great he is. I tell him I wish he was there. I tell him I'm all his. I ask him if he feels good. I say everything I'm supposed to say, and he mumbles a good night and hangs up the phone.

Dawn walks around her new apartment, wine swirling. I watch her as her eyes travel over the books on the shelf. I look out the window and imagine her staring out it every morning, taking a few minutes to herself the way I do, with my window. 14

Once when she visited me in college she caught me, sipping on coffee and just staring at the bus stop across the street. It was after James broke up with me, when my own heartache was all I could think about. Freshman year - he was mine first. That was ten years ago. "Stop gazing out the window and wallowing," she'd said. "Stop being a cliche."

Two years later, after I'd found someone else who would break my heart harder, she and James ended up together. I'd stayed friends with him, of course - I can never let anything go; I'm one of those girls who forces men to change their phone numbers - and

I was truly over him because he'd introduced me to the guy I was seeing then. And I was completely supportive of their relationship, even if at times I thought he was too good for her and she shouldn't pretend to be my friend just because she was jealous of my friendship with her boyfriend. And then even when they broke up I wouldn't let him touch me, because their thing was real and our thing was two months when we were eighteen. Because now that she knows what it's like to lose something things will be better between me and her, and I don't want to mess that up. I never can let anything go.

I'm being coy. I know I am. Ifl don't mention James or Ryan, Dawn won't know ifl'm seeing anyone. She'll assume something might happen with James and me.

She might even go so far as to accuse me. And then I'll tell her about Ryan. And I'll get to be indignant, be self-righteous, prove that I'm the good friend.

I should ask about James. I should tell her I've talked to him - just talked. I should let her know she can tell me anything she wants to. 15

One night Ryan came over and we watched this old Swedish movie, about death and revenge and pagan rituals, and we couldn't keep the story straight so we made up our own, and then eventually the movie was just silent black and white images flickering on my TV, white noise doing its thing, the smell of beer from his breath mixing with the smell of my fabric softener from my sweater.

"Can I ask you a personal question?" he asked.

I told him that since I'd known him he'd asked me ifl like to swallow, be spanked, and take it on my hands and knees, so, "More personal than that?"

"Why aren't you dating anyone?"

"Why aren't you?"

My legs were lying across his lap and he was rubbing his hand up and down my inner thigh, over my jeans. And still he said, "Not into the whole commitment thing right now. Or haven't found the right girl."

"Thanks."

"What?"

"Nothing." I closed my eyes. I took a deep breath.

When you date someone you just end up hating them.

I wander into Dawn's kitchen. She never really cooks, or is home at all, so there are still moving boxes taped shut, except for the one we pulled a couple of dusty wine glasses out of earlier tonight. Stuck to the refrigerator are a couple of take out menus, a grocery list (milk, Luna bars, frozen pizza), and the back of a business card with a phone 16 number handwritten on the back. Above it is written: James (H). I recognize the turquoise back of the card, and without turning it over know that it's his card, his handwriting.

I wonder if hate is the right word. I wonder how two people can still care about each other when they can't even stand to be in the same room. I should ask her. I should tell her about Ryan. I should ask her advice on ending it with him, on ending something that never really began. ACTING

As an infant, Christine could smile on demand. Not just smile, actually; she could

frown, laugh, and pout, as well, prompted by just the right inflection and tone in an

adult's voice. Her mother discovered this while attempting to calm her colic one morning when Christine was just two months old. "Be happy," she had sighed. "Just be happy." And Christine smiled.

Her mother had not said, "Look happy," nor had she said, "Act happy," but this was what Christine did, and this conversation between the two of them may have been the first in a lifetime of miscommunications between Christine and someone who loved her.

If not for Christine's father's traumatizing stint as a child actor, her mother would have signed her up for commercial work or modeling. What a gift to have a child who did as she was told! But Christine's father detailed the rejection he went through after he caught the acting bug at the age of five during the filming of a cereal commercial, and he insisted that this career would result in nothing but confusion and heartache for their sweet girl, so the subject was dropped. Christine could be happy that her parents had made an active decision to shield her from this potential harm.

Once the colic had subsided and the baby teeth had pushed through, once the diaper rash had healed and the acid reflux had been diagnosed, Christine Was a relatively happy child. She grew up with a puppy and always had a new dress to wear Easter

Sunday. She spent summers at the beach house and winters at the cabin. Her father

17 18 made good money and her mother stayed home. And the year she began kindergarten,

Christine's parents brought home a baby brother, Ryan, who Christine loved just as much

as everyone said she would.

There was distance between the two of them, in terms of age, but Christine found

Ryan amusing and he was always just young enough to consider her an adult. By the time she was twelve and he was seven, Christine was allowed to baby-sit him. Most of these occasions did not last very long; Christine's mother would never leave for more than two hours, just long enough for a trip to the grocery store or a haircut or, more frequently later that year, a doctor's appointment. Christine had a best friend, a girl named Angela, and Angela would come over to see what baby-sitting was like.

Most of the time, what it was like was Ryan playing by himself and the two of them playing together. They didn't call it "playing," but they didn't yet call it "hanging out." Their favorite thing to do was investigate. They loved being able to analyze

Christine's house with voyeuristic closeness: over a period of a few months they read every bill; they unearthed all of Christine's and Ryan's baby teeth, which their father had hidden in his sock drawer; they found the fire-and-ice rose Christine's mother had pressed into an old astrology book, between the dates of February 21 and February 22.

After that day Christine kept the book under her bed along with a small sheet of paper, and on that sheet of paper she listed the birthdays of all the people in her family as she remembered or discovered them (even grandparents, cousins too), as well as her parents' anniversary and any other important dates she could think of, but she could not place the importance of that date, of that rose. Thinking of the rose gave her a queasy feeling in 19 her stomach, and some days she was tempted to slip the book, rose and all, into her denim pocketbook, walk the mile to the shopping center out at the main road, and dispose of it in the dumpster, wipe it from her memory once and for all. She never could bring herself to do it.

She especially could not do it once her mother died. This was when she was thirteen. Her mother had had cancer and had not told her children. Her mother had not suffered, her father said. Christine, Ryan, and their father sat on the L-shaped couch.

Ryan sat on their father's left knee. Her father wrapped his arm around Ryan, making sure he did not fall, and reached over to squeeze Christine's shoulder. He squeezed it so hard she had to bite her lip to make sure she didn't cry out in pain. He squeezed it ahd said, "She did not suffer." He looked her in the eye. He said, "You have to be strong for your brother now," so Christine nodded, and she bit her lip harder.

Christine did stay strong for her brother, but alone in her room she would gently open the astrology book, gently place the rose in her line of vision on her nightstand, and lay open the pages for February 21 and 22, reading about the personality of people who had those birthdays. February 21: The Day of Intimacy. February 22: The Day of

Universality. Those born on February 21 were honest, but detached. Those born on

February 22 were dedicated, but unforgiving. Which day was the rose attached to?

Christine hoped it was February 21. Even among the negatives, February 21 was slightly better. It was better to be detached than unforgiving, she felt. It was better to shield yourself from hurt than to squirrel away that hurt, to hold a grudge which would only affect the bearer, not the recipient. It was definitely better to be born on February 21. 20

Christine hoped that, whoever this lover of her mother's was (and she was quite sure it was a lover), he had been the best lover possible for her mother, that he had treated her well and taught her something about life, that he had been the reason Christine's mother had ended up with Christine's father. That his influence had led to the births of Christine and Ryan.

When she was fifteen, she began telling her father that she was staying after classes to work on the school newspaper. She would get home by 7:00 or 8:00, early enough to pick Ryan up from the neighbor's house and order in dinner before her father got home from work. Christine was not on the newspaper staff; she had no interest in journalism. She was starring in the school production of Annie, and she had to stay after for rehearsals. If her father had paid very close attention, he would have noticed that

Christine walked around the house singing most evenings. Maybe far away, or maybe real nearby, he may be pouring her coffee, she may be straightening his tie. It was not that her father did not notice or love his children; it was that he simply did not take the time to analyze them. They both made A's and B's in school and had plenty of friends.

He was teaching Christine to drive and he went to all of Ryan's baseball games. They both were coping well with their mother's death; they were smart children and stayed out of trouble. What more was there to know?

Christine had heard the story of her father's brief acting career, but she did not know that she was almost placed on the same path as a child. She simply knew that her father wouldn't approve of her as an actress. The day before the play opened, she told him, and she gave him a ticket, and she asked him to bring Ryan to the performance. 21

They fought, but it was not a bad fight, and Christine's father made sure he and Ryan were in the front row. After the show he gave her a bouquet of fire-and-ice roses, and

Christine felt a happiness she had not felt in a long time, a sense of satisfaction; the nausea she associated with the astrology book, which she had carried around with her for three years, suddenly felt less intense.

It did not go away completely, though, and she felt traces of it lingering with her as she prepared to go away to college. Now, though, thoughts of the rose and the astrology book and her mother combined with a general feeling of uncertainty about how to navigate the world. In her senior year of high school Christine had started noticing that her friends and classmates were more confident than her. Their clothes fit their bodies better and their hair always looked nice. Their school folders never had frayed corners from where idle fingers fidgeted, never had spiral doodles or random math scribbled in purple ink. Christine had never had a boyfriend. Her only kisses had been on stage.

These things caused her so much stress that by the time she was a junior at State she was in the clinic once every two weeks, and at the counselor's office even more frequently than that. She had a minor in Drama, but no major yet. Her counselor urged her to go with her instinct and major in Drama, but her father had begged her to choose something more practical. Her counselor then urged her to major in English. Christine had it in the back of her mind that she would go to graduate school, that was it, she would get a silly job for a year back home and save up money and apply to graduate school for acting. She would not tell her father. She would just apply and be accepted and he 22 would be proud of her after the fact, the way he was with her first play in high school and the fire-and-ice roses.

She did not go to graduate school. She did not go back home. In her senior year she fell in love, and they graduated, and she followed him to New York, and her father loved him, and her friends loved him, and Ryan looked up to him, and he supported her, and she began auditioning for plays off-Broadway, and he worked in advertising, and she won a small part in a small production that ran for six months, and he went to as many of her shows as he could, and one day he was in a taxi that was hit by another taxi and he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Sometimes this happens.

Sometimes when he had gone off to work for the day and she didn't have to be at the theater until noon, she would linger in bed, smelling him on their sheets, or she would sit on the edge of the bathtub, letting the humidity from his shower stick to her body, to her hair.

This was the way she stayed in New York after his death. Unhealthily, obsessively. What was a word stronger than love? What felt worse than longing? What did she really mean when she whispered to nothing, I miss you, letting her words be carried away by the wind and the noise and the eight million people walking by her?

What was a word stronger than miss?

One weekend, two months after his death, Angela came to visit. They reluctantly put on dresses and high heels and went to a bar and flirted. Angela said it would be good for Christine. Angela said Christine hadn't been married; it was okay. That night a man 23

asked Christine what she did for a living, and she said she was an actress, and that was the first time she had said that out loud. She gave Angela the keys to her apartment and

she went home with that man. She let him make her feel desired; she let him touch every part of her body. In the morning she kissed him on the neck to wake him up, briefly. She whispered, "Thanks," and he smiled and said nothing and watched her walk out the door.

The next night she did the same thing with a different man. The next night, Angela got on a plane to go home, and after Christine dropped her off at the airport she went to another bar and found another man and did the same thing, again.

She was only twenty-six, and in her heart she was a widow, so she changed; she thought she should work on herself and try to help others that way. She thought about all the time she wasted fidgeting, all the time she wasted worrying about her father, about

Ryan. Ryan was finishing college and always broke. Their father had started giving him such grief when he asked to borrow money that he had just stopped asking, and as a result he went without groceries some weeks. Christine wasn'tthat well off either, but she'd send him money and gift certificates whenever she could, because when he described eating eggs for every meal because they were cheap, she would start to get that queasy feeling in her stomach again, and she would wonder if this was what their mother had had in mind for her children.

Ten years on a sitcom probably wasn't what her mother had in mind for her children either, but sometimes life doesn't turn out to be what the children had in mind for themselves either. 24

In the future she'd never be able to describe how it happened. She'd be in the middle of an interview on the red carpet or a talk show, and they'd ask about her rise to

fame, and she'd say it never felt like much of a rise, just one of those afternoons when you go to the amusement park on a whim, and there are no lines, and before you know it you're strapped in and heading for the first free fall.

She didn't want to say it was because of her sleeping around; she could talk about rough beginnings all she wanted, about losing her mother and fussing over Ryan and not getting the support she wanted from her father, and the taxi accident, but that was a lie.

The truth was she met a guy in a bar one night and she started sleeping with him regularly. At first it was dangerous, li.ke all the others, and then it became comfortable, but still taboo because of the way it began, and it was loose and free. She didn't really know what that meant, but she liked getting on the phone with Angela and saying, "It's no strings attached, you know, it's loose and free." And he was in television, in the news, nothing important really, but after a couple of years of the two of them being loose and free, never really calling, just always sort of finding each other in the same bar week after week, he got a job in the entertainment division of his company, and he got Christine an audition for a sitcom pilot. And that's how Christine got the role that made her famous.

But she could never say all that, of course, so she would go on talk shows and the red carpet and talk about roller coasters.

Christine was the oldest of all the people she worked with; there were five of them, total, including a fifteen-year-old kid whose mother had also died when he was thirteen, and who Christine liked to talk to about the importance of family. People liked 25 the show because of the kid, and Christine never thought to mind that everyone else on the cast got more attention than her. The truth was, she didn't really want the attention.

She was afraid of the gossip shows saying one thing one day and something else the next.

Like Janie, who played her sister, and Matt, who played her boss. Janie and Matt both came out of the closet during their time on the show, and people reacted very differently. One day they all went to build homes for tornado victims; there was press there, and cameras. Matt was sweaty and the front page of a magazine had a picture of him: loose denim shirt unbuttoned over a white sleeveless shirt, sweat on his forehead, dirt on his cheek, squint in his eye. The headline was positive. In the same magazine, there was a picture of Janie: cropped hair pushed back with a headband, stern look, swinging a hammer like Thor. Christine could not understand why each photograph was so different, why the photographers had not used more flattering pictures of Janie or less flattering pictures of Matt. Surely there was a variety. Surely this had something to do with gender, but what?

She didn't want to be subject to this randomness, so she tried to stay out of the spotlight, only making appearances her producers asked her to. After a few months she hired a publicist, and her publicist said there was the risk of seeming a diva if she stayed out of the spotlight too much. Christine felt she worked just as hard maintaining the balance between appearing like a diva and appearing like a fame whore as she did acting on the show. Still, she accepted awards and went to fundraisers, but she wouldn't date other actors and she turned down a role in an action movie that turned out to be the biggest summer blockbuster in history. 26

When they were younger, Ryan had asked her why she wanted to act.

"Because," she had said, "you get to be a part of the most important part of

someone's life. The character's life."

But this was only true of main characters, Ryan argued, and that it often made him sad to watch movies and plays where he never got to see the minutia of the characters' lives. And the movies were an act of trickery: every character's story has an unhappy ending because every story is a life and every person dies. Happy endings were just early endings, where the camera turned off at the high point of someone's life and the audience never saw the rest.

Ryan had children and married, but Christine did not. Not because time to do so slipped away from her, and not because she felt otherwise fulfilled (though it did and she was), but because relationships to her had always meant too much heartache. These relationships would apply to children as well, and Christine wanted none of that. It was not, however, until she was in her fifties that she realized she had consciously made the choice to be alone. It was watching her father age that she made sense of her decision, knowing that she loved the people she loved but could not add any more to the mix.

So what did Christine do instead of having children and relationships? She worked. She acted, she began to direct. She stayed close to the people who had fulfilled her: her father, Ryan and his family, Angela, her castmates from the sitcom which had long reached its much anticipated conclusion. Directing films was hard and left very lirtle time for fun, but this suited Christine just fine. 27

When Christine was sixty-eight she was given two lifetime achievement awards by different organizations. The awards were discouraging, because Christine still saw herself as youthful and productive. And after the awards she slowly stopped producing fresh new work, work she felt committed to and confident in. She acted in minor roles when parts for women her age became available, but was only in high demand as a consult for the up-and-coming movers and shakers in Hollywood, a new Hollywood she didn't understand. But as Christine worked she continued to smile, allowing fewer and fewer into her world, and at the end of the day only she knew what was behind her smile and the minutia of the life she lived. WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU

For as long as they could remember, Matilda (shark attack) and Bruce (mauled by

panther) had been the only two members of their Victims of Violent Attacks support

group who were attacked by animals. In their common ground they found a bond they

could not live without. They supported each other when no one else understood. In a

sense, as they saw it, they were each other's sponsors, meeting covertly outside of group to discuss feelings the others couldn't share.

This was until Whitney. Whitney, with her pencil skirt and faded pit bull bite left calf scar. With her flippy hair and see-through blouses, with her throaty laugh and cakey eye liner. With her tears. With her words. With her pain.

That evening over pie, Mattie was quick to speak on the matter. "I mean, who does she think she is? Chrissy's husband tied her to a cement block and pushed her off the roof. Jimmy's father put out cigarettes on his arm every day for years. You get mauled by a goddamn endangered species and she thinks her freaking dog bite means something? I mean what is her deal? They should never have let her in in the first place."

"That's what they used to say about us, you know. In that whole month when we talked about nothing but the intent of our attackers and our previous relationships to them. That was an attempt to make us feel bad."

"But they eventually came around. That day you pointed out it wasn't the 29 panther who attacked you, it was life. It was the universe."

28 29

"Who's to say she doesn't feel the same way? Like they say, not all scars are visible."

"I'm just saying, I think she's up to something."

"Listen, you're not going to convince me. Besides, we shouldn't be talking about this." Group frowned upon socialization outside of meetings for this exact reason, to avoid gossip. "Let's just give her a chance, okay?"

Mattie would try to tell her husband about things that happened in group. Never the personal stories or her personal judgments of individuals (which extended far beyond her hatred toward Whitney), but the real details. She got home by 10:30 on Wednesdays where he waited for her in front of the TV. While they made their way up the stairs, brushed their teeth, and changed into soft pajamas that would be pulled down and disheveled in bed, Mattie described what the group members did with their hands.

Chrissy's quiet, folded hands contradicted her lips, which she bit so much that they bled.

Jimmy slid the tip of his forefinger in circles around his thumbnail, stopping at every fifth rotation to pick at his cuticle.

She never described Bruce. She felt talking too much about him would be a betrayal, to both him and her husband.

The day Whitney arrived, she described this new person. How her balled-up fists jutted quickly across her chest and under her arms as soon as she sat down. Mattie had spent the entire session looking at the tops of Whitney's wrists, checking them for wrinkles, hair, anything that would give away something about her. She saw nothing, so 30

she told her husband about the chips she noticed in Whitney's French manicure as she watched her shoulder her purse, locate her car keys, and quickly put her hands into her pockets at the end of the night.

As they fell asleep he held her hand, he squeezed his arms around her waist as if he were trying to press some of his own life into her body. But as his sleep deepened, and the heat his passion had radiated from his body cooled, he involuntarily rolled over, his subconscious positioning his icy back to her. Mattie shimmied closer to him and kissed his shoulder blades. She slid her arm over his bony hips and up the front of his T­ shirt. The way his body cooled during REM sleep always worried her if she didn't fall asleep first. She pressed her palm to his chest and refused to breathe until she felt his heart thumping against it. There her hand lay all night while she slept and he dreamed.

Bruce's attack had been unlike Matilda's in that it had come out of nowhere.

Swimming in the ocean, one takes certain risks. Sharks are expected, especially during those mid-summer months when the waters are warm and nature pits itself against humanity for replenishment and survival.

It's not expected that pulling over to change a tire will leave you with a prosthetic arm and half a face, no matter what the climate or where you are. Knowing the pink sky meant night would come soon, all he had been concerned with that day was replacing the flat before dark so as to not be hit by oncoming traffic. The highway was at the edge of the preserve, and after the road, the swale, the tall chain-link fence, and the canal, the alligators that populated this area were retreating into the marshlands. These should have 31

been cause for concern. Not the 80 remaining Florida panthers, one of which would find

his way down the grassy swale to where Bruce worked too quickly to pay attention to all

of his surroundings.

Was being attacked by a giant cat any different than a domestic dog? Though he hadn't spoken with Whitney, he imagined her scars to be fresh, and deep. Perhaps the

dog was her own. Perhaps it was a loved one's. By extension, then, wasn't she more of a victim than he or Mattie?

On the days after group, Bruce went to his individual appointments to talk about all the things he never said. Like how he felt adrift, like he was floating.

"Can you speak in more concrete terms?"

"No."

"Do you still feel safe alone with yourself?"

"Sure."

"No thoughts of suicide?"

"No."

"Thoughts of harming yourself?"

"No."

"Thoughts of harming others?"

"No."

"What do you mean when you say you're floating?"

Pause. 32

"Is it like just going through the motions?"

Pause.

"Is it like just making ends meet?"

Pause.

"Emotionally, I mean, making ends meet?"

"No. I mean floating. Going through the motions would be trying. I am not trying. My body is acting against my will. Staying afloat naturally."

"Why do you think you're using a water metaphor?"

"Does there have to be a reason?"

"No, but is there?"

"Well, I can't think of any other air, fire, or earth metaphors. It was just the first thing that came to mind."

"Do you want to try? Let's think of a fire metaphor."

Pause.

When a shark attacks a seal or a porpoise, often it will bite once and retreat, until the animal loses enough blood that the rest of the attack will not be a struggle. Other seals and porpoises don't come to rescue it. When this shark attacked the Mattie, other humans were around to get her out of the water before the bite had a chance to become fatal.

For five years, this was her driving force. Her primary source of guilt. She had been rescued. She read the news with a morbid intensity, narrowing in on violent crimes 33 that so often had no survivors. It seemed to her that no one in group appreciated their survival - they never got away from the fact that they'd been traumatized, that they were victims. She wondered sometimes if she wasn't exactly the same as them.

There was a big old oak tree outside Bruce's office window, even from the sixth floor he couldn't see the top. It was a dry April, the bark had begun to look discolored and flaky. There has been a lot of wind, but still no rain, and he could see bits of small branch just shaking off the tree. Even the larger limbs swayed in the wind.

But when he inquired, the groundskeepers assured him the tree was healthy, it was fine, and the cause of the swaying was due only to the strength of the wind gusts rattling it. Bruce marveled that it hadn't snapped into a thousand pieces yet.

He didn't even need wind to crumble to the ground."

The next week Bruce did not show up to group.

Matilda noticed this and did not comment or react. She sat to the right of

Whitney, crossed one ankle over the other, and tucked her hands under her thighs.

She did not try to call him. Instead, after group, she drove out to the road where she had been attacked. She sat with her car idling, but when she tried to get out, she couldn't. She turned the car off and slept there all night.

The group attended Bruce's funeral. They sat quietly in the back, as a group, but did not socialize or speak much except the required pleasantries and condolences. 34

That night, over pie, she told Whitney about her disgust for Jimmy. "Repetitive

abuse isn't an attack. I mean, it's violent, but an attack is an isolated incident. And then he's always saying things about pain like he knows something. I mean, who does he think he is?" A RECIPE FOR BANANA BREAD

I know many things, but only few do I remember learning. I remember learning

how to write my own name, the soft curve of the J (hat optional), the circle and line that

made the a, the bump of an n, the twisted e. I remember learning to focus on one task at

a time, night after night of law school, absorbing information bit by bit then making

connections as I watched my knowledge explode onto paper. And I will remember

learning how to make banana bread. Watching this past Thanksgiving as my new mother-in-law, Rachel, squeezed fermented banana juice out of six limp black peels. I know now that to make really great banana bread I need really ripe bananas. Recipes usually say very ripe or overly ripe, but what they mean is black - beyond recognition.

"The trick is to leave them in a bunch while they ripen," Rachel told me. "If you pull them apart, they'll get black, but they'll get moldy and you won't want to use them then. You just let them sit for a couple of weeks, out of the way on the counter

somewhere. It seems like it would be the opposite, but the less you move them or touch them, the less mold they'll have on them when you're ready."

Of all the dishes we could have been making in advance the night before that

Thanksgiving, Rachel was spending fifteen minutes of prep time and an hour of oven space to show me how to make banana bread, which wasn't even on the menu for dinner the next day.

"People always forget about breakfast on Thanksgiving. This isn't much, but it comes out right every time, and now breakfast is one less thing to worry about."

35 36

"Better than breakfast with my family." I measured the sugar in the Pyrex liquid measuring cup, stooping down to make sure I was at eye level the way she'd shown me when we were making the pies. Sugar is considered a liquid in baking, and has to be measured the same way you measure water or any other liquid. I don't know the exact culinary or scientific reason for this distinction, but it makes sense. When you get sugar out of the bag, there's not as much adjusting or spooning required as there is with flour.

You just get the stream going to whatever size flow you want, and it pours down toward the bowl like so much water.

The dry measuring cups are the plastic ones with little handles; they're meant for leveling ingredients. They usually say things like "l cup -- 8 oz." on the handle. The wet measuring cups are usually glass or clear plastic, have spouts, and have lines on the side so you can fill them with whatever amount ofliquid you want. 1/8 cup -- 1 oz, 1/4 cup --

2 oz; 112 cup -- 4 oz; 1 cup -- 8 oz. I didn't point out that there were spouts and ounces on the dry measuring cups, and that I thought a cup was a cup no matter what you were measuring. It seemed so important to her to do everything perfectly. And I was the only one helping, after all.

Rachel passed me two sticks of softened butter while she ran a fork through the banana puree, trying to squash out any remaining lumps. When she found one, she attacked it with the prongs of the fork against the inside of the bowl, coming at it from every angle until it was just fibers swimming in a pool of banana wine. She had used six bananas; we were making a double batch. "We have a lot of mouths to feed this year, so 37

I thought we'd do a loaf and a batch of muffins. We'll put nuts only in one ofthose­ which do you think?"

I suggested the muffins. They looked like cupcakes. Sarah's kids - my new nieces and nephews - like cupcakes. They don't like nuts.

"Good point,'' Rachel said. Making that decision was more control than I was comfortable with. I'd been going along with everything Rachel had said all day - opting for nuts jarred me.

Rachel was right about most things, I'd found. And even when she wasn't, she made us feel she was right. She was right about the amount of mouths to feed, too.

There were a lot more people in the house that year than there had been the year before. I hadn't been there then. Jake and I weren't married yet. I was still making up my mind.

Whenever I said that, whenever anyone said that, it was all they said, one of those heavy phrases people skated around because they didn't want to ask too many details or were afraid of the truth.

Jake's sister Sarah, her husband, and their kids had been at her in-laws'. But things had happened, things were happening, things were going to happen, and that year I was married. That year I was in Rachel's kitchen, wearing a lavender and green floral print apron, making pumpkin pie and green bean casserole and banana bread, tradition.

This year Sarah was too pregnant to get on a plane, so they'd stayed in town and was going to be over early the next morning. She was only five months along, which was perfectly acceptable for flying, but no one mentioned that. My parents had even decided to fly in so we could have Thanksgiving as one huge family. 38

All these people had come, out of concern for Rachel, for her health, for what could and would be her last Thanksgiving, but I was the only one up at midnight making banana bread with her. I had wanted to be a part of this family, and to be there for them, for Rachel. Part of me had gotten married for her, knowing that I might rethink everything after she was gone.

I cracked four eggs into a small bowl and beat them with a whisk, then slowly poured them into the butter and sugar combination. When I was done, Rachel poured in the banana while I mixed the whole thing with a wooden spoon.

"I'll grease the pans. You start on the flour mixture,'' she instructed.

I measured out the flour with the dry measuring cups, gently scraping off the excess with my finger, making sure to not pack it in too tightly. I added baking soda, baking powder, salt. I began sifting them all into a separate bowl, but paused to watch what Rachel was doing to the pans. She half-unwrapped a stick of butter, holding on to one end and running the other along the bottom and sides of the loaf pan, then in a circular motion within each muffin compartment. After she was done, she took a jar of cinnamon sugar and sprinkled it over every buttered surface. She angled the pans around so they were fully coated, then poured the excess cinnamon into an empty teacup on the counter. She looked up and noticed me watching her. "I like putting cinnamon or nutmeg in unexpected places. Try it in the flour mixture." She removed a stick of cinnamon from ajar and grated some into the bowl I'd been working on. "No one ever thinks to do that." 39

I certainly would never think to do that. Who would? It was a habit particular to

Rachel, something she wouldn't think to tell anyone unless it was in the moment. I

wondered how many other habits like that would never be passed on.

After the dry ingredients had been combined, we mixed them into the sugary

banana goo until everything was just moistened. Rachel pulled up a stool and slowly

lowered herself onto it. She closed her eyes and put her right hand to the side of her face,

so her fingers were just grazing her curly black hair. She was only just starting to age, I

realized. Slight strands of gray flecked the curls. Wrinkles only came out of the corners

of her eyes when she closed them really tightly. I hadn't seen her sit down all day. She'd

been resting all week so she'd have the energy for the holiday. This is what we've been

training/or, she'd joked, as we'd begun the day in the kitchen.

The oven beeped softly, three times, to indicate the preheating was done. I was

glad for the interruption, because I didn't want to disturb Rachel's peace but I didn't

know what to do next. She opened her eyes and surveyed what we'd completed.

"I think I'll go to bed now," she said. "You can finish up here."

I stumbled. "Clean up, you mean. I can clean up." I paused, thinking about all the little things Rachel would do. So many tricks she hadn't shown me. Nothing was cooked yet, and I wouldn't know how to start again if I burned it all.

"Just use your instincts," she said. "Just take care of things."

"I guess I don't really know what else to do."

"Don't take it too seriously. It's just breakfast." With that, she kissed me on the cheek and headed off to bed. 40

Next Thanksgiving we'll divide up the recipes and the menus, the china and the tablecloths, the lavender and green floral print aprons. Sarah said we'd talk later about making the banana bread; it doesn't really matter much, because of all the other food that gets eaten later in the day. But no one remembers breakfast on Thanksgiving. I told her

I'll make it, even before everyone wakes up, if she wants. Fifteen minutes of prep time and one hour of oven space isn't really too much to ask, I think. JOURNEYS

Julia wishes this train was going anywhere, anywhere but back to Washington, back to her miserable job and lonely life and the streetlights that shine too brightly through her curtains at night. In fact, she wishes she wasn't on this train at all. It's not nearly as romantic as she'd imagined. The vent above her blows either too hot or too cold, and she can't get comfortable enough in this stiff coach seat to take a nap, even though the chairs recline to a near 180-degree angle. Worst of all, she hasn't spoken a word to anyone since she boarded four hours ago.

She'd known it was na"ive from the start, the hope that she'd meet some exotic stranger at midnight somewhere near Savannah and begin a passionate love affair or have an anonymous tryst. Exotic strangers don't typically board the Amtrak in Sanford,

Florida. Still, through the motion sickness, she can't help but look too long at every man who passes her way.

Derek has always found trains perfect for pacing, because it's a while before anyone can notice he's doing it. Each car of passengers is a fresh start. A stroll down the aisle, noting who makes eye contact, who is asleep, who is staring out the window, who is reading, who is vacantly looking ahead with air in their cheeks and a steadfast desire not to vomit. Press the button to open the mechanical doors between cars, repeat. On the way back it's even better, more anonymous. All he can see are the backs of chairs and the occasional fellow pacer. Get to the end of the coach cars. Turn around. Repeat.

41 42

Most amusing to Derek are those afflicted with motion sickness. He is used to the rocking and rhythms of trains in general and this route in particular. This route, the Auto

Train, only goes from Sanford to Lorton, Virginia, and back. Each day. This train, like

Derek, paces. Who travels to Sanford? Who travels to Lorton? No one. Everyone drives from Palm Beach, boards, disembarks, drives up to D.C. or New York or New

Jersey or Pennsylvania or Ohio. But it's not the destination that matters, it's the journey.

The Auto Train attracts a certain type of person: on the surface, those wealthy enough to maintain a residence in the North and one in the South; underneath, those who want magic in their travels. Mile after mile of I-95 is dull for those, like himself, who are not entertained by their own imaginations. Throw your car on the Auto Train and relax for 16 hours, walk around, meet some people, watch a movie, sleep, knit. Watch the scenery fly by; see the seasons change from summery Florida to icy Virginia in a matter of hours. Ask yourself what kind of person lives so close to the train track, so close you can see their sheets drying on the clothesline; ask yourself what kind of poverty warrants a clothesline. Look away, and have a drink in the lounge car. Excite yourself with the romance of good old-fashioned American travel: a sweating mass of individuals going somewhere together.

This magic no longer excites Derek, the world doesn't excite him either, and so he paces, waiting for something to happen.

Two days ago, Julia was walking into the Hayes Brothers Funeral Home in Eustis, a dulled white building with black trim, a decor she'd remarked at last year's funeral was too bright, too dirty, too unplanned. These places were supposed to be comforting, so 43

why wasn't more attention paid in planning to the color scheme or architectural design?

Without thinking, she told her grandmother she thought the next one should be

somewhere else. But when it came time for the next one, this one, the graying white and

dimming black of the building, the flat roof and scuffy sidewalk, the vinyl pews and

squeaky microphone, these elements were comforting. The family curse was consistent and so were the Hayes brothers, and consistency was a relief after two months next to

Uncle Charlie's hospital bed, where each day Julia walked in hoping for the best and expecting the worst, and never feeling like she understood her emotions.

Aunt Miriam, the sister of Charlie's late wife (And with a family this large, who can ever remember who is blood and who is water?) was the first to greet her when she walked in. Miriam always frowns with a twinkle in her eye as if stifling a laugh, and the this pregnant humor is, like everything else about this funeral, a comfort.

Julia kissed Miriam on both cheeks, an old joke of theirs; when Julia was young

Miriam would put one hand on her hip and say, "Let's be fancy ladies!" And this eventually, like so many other jokes, became a part of their normal routine, their everyday routine.

"I forgot to tell you this story," Julia greeted her, as if midway through a conversation already. "A couple of months ago, right before I came down here, I had a moment on the subway. I didn't realize the woman sitting behind me was holding a bouquet of flowers, but the smell hit me - you know, that generic flower smell that's like you just stepped into a florist's refrigerator - and all of a sudden I felt like I was at a funeral." 44

"They say smell is the sense linked closest to memory." Miriam rubbed her hand on Julia's back. Julia was so accustomed to this greeting that it was almost like there was no greeting at all.

"But that's the thing, it should have been a sad memory, right? Except I wasn't overcome by sadness." Julia's heels clicked over the varnished wood floor, a hollow sound she associated with being purposeful. Like a lawyer walking across the hallowed lobby of a courthouse. "I smelled flowers, and flowers made me think of funerals, and funerals made me think of family, and I was happy. In that homesick kind of way."

"Do you have to go back so soon?"

The truth was, Julia could stay an extra week. But doing so would mean staying an extra week, staying in the same small town she'd worked so hard to get out of, and watching more family members die. It had been five in three years, and this last one had taken too much out of her. So she lied, and told Aunt Miriam she was out of leave time, that she hated the temp who was trying to take over her job.

"You hate your job."

"But it's mine."

The announcement is made for the 8:00 dinner seating and Derek finds himself at a table with an elderly couple who only speak to each other, and a bitchy traveling nurse.

The latter, who makes sure to introduce herself as "Tami with an 'I"' (though Derek wasn't sure if this was Tami or Tammi and didn't care to ask), describes her inability to stay in one place for too long, citing her desire to "pile adventure on top of adventure" for 45 the rest of her life. Which is fine, but the way she scoffs and purses her lips together makes her sound condescending and makes him wonder when she will reach her threshold for adventure. Her crow's feet and the strands of gray running through her mousy brown hair would indicate that final adventure is coming, or that she's really had no adventures; she's embarking on her first and, like all women he knows, has been so wounded and hurt she thinks she'll make the most of her inability to settle or find someone to settle for her.

He saw her earlier, or rather he'd smelled her; recognizing immediately the mixture of drugstore cologne and glossy paper, he glanced at the two seats diagonally behind him to see this woman rubbing an open magazine against her wrist. He'd wanted to rip the magazine out of her hands and throw it to the floor.

You 're going to smell like that through the night, lady. Everyone around you will get a headache and you'll smell like trash, because the next place magazine cologne samples go is the trash and then they mix with the smell of black banana peels and snotty tissues, and then that's what you associate with that perfume for the rest ofyour life.

Well of course he doesn't say any of that, and won't, because he knows if this were a bar or a party he could just play distant and aloof and Tammi would be all over him, as women of that age usually are. (Even when he was 22 the 40-something women would look a little too long, though he was now not that far off from that age himself. He always felt somehow they were asking to be mistreated, so he wouldn't even care about tossing them aside the next day.) The cheap perfume smell still lingers, as he suspected it would, and it mixes with the smell of the cheap white wine sitting in the small plastic 46

goblet in front of Tammi. And Derek just nods along, answering her questions and

letting her outwardly judge/ignore him based on his responses. The auto industry.

(Tammi is thinking about trading hers in.) Driving back to Michigan. (Tammi, in case

Derek cares, has never been to Michigan.) About nine hours, but stopping to see friends

in Cleveland. (Tammi hates Cleveland.) Six months. Six months in each place. Family

stuff. (Tammi is fascinated by why everyone always thinks family is so important.)

Boring, personal, family stuff.

Julia is surrounded by people in groups - couples, families, a few college-aged kids across the aisle playing some version of "I Spy" that involves a flask. Someone spies a magazine, someone counts the visible magazines on the car, someone takes a drink for each one.

I spy sadness. I spy desire. I spy a girl who can't let go of her roots and can't go back to them either.

As temporary and fleeting as everyone and everything in D.C. is, it is hers, all of it, and it doesn't constantly smell like a florist's refrigerator. It's sad, it's lonely, but it's sad and lonely all the time, and Julia never has to see anything or anyone she loves beaten up and bruised by life there. The only damage is her own.

Derek vows this is the last time he'll be taking this trip. Six years of back and forth. He could move to Florida, sure, but his resolve is steady, that making a permanent move means giving in. Means making his entire life about his older brother, when at 30 47

Derek should be living his own life, and so should his sisters. Ron has been like this for eight years, but it's only in the last six that the other three siblings decided something had to be done, and that's when they came up with the schedule. Knowing his was the kind of work he could simply pick up and get more of, he let the girls iron out the details, working around Liz's touring schedule and Jane's summer vacation.

For the most part, none of the three was ever alone with Ron. The house is on one quarter of an old quail hunting plantation, spooky, and haunted. And Ron won't leave, hasn't left in eight years. His siblings stopped trying to understand why.

For a weekend of overlap, all four siblings were together before Derek left for good. Saturday night they made dinner and lists: groceries to buy, house maintenance to do, back-up psychiatrists for when Dr. Conners would inevitably decide he would no longer do house calls, wasn't that the point of treatment, to change, to no longer tolerate the behavior that got them all in this mess in the first place?

"It's not behavior." Jane tossed the salad with the ferocious intensity Derek knew was supposed to make them aware of how much she dreaded her next three-month shift.

Passive-aggressive. "You're crazy if you think it's behavior."

"We've had this conversation before,'' Liz said.

"Have we?" Ron snarked. "Hadn't noticed."

Derek took four plates down from the cabinet while Liz folded napkins into the shape of swans. If unhealthy behaviors needed to be stopped, shouldn't be tolerated, it seemed to him there were three people with troubling conditions in this family, and Ron 48

wasn't one of them. Each of them orbited around this subject and this house yearly, with

individual heartaches they could never vocalize.

When he isn't finding Ron manipulative or selfish, when he's not resentful of the energy he spends on someone else's problem, when he doesn't feel overwhelmed with the way pure, unconditional sibling support makes him take this trip every year, Derek truly admires Ron. Ron has stopped looking for validation from the outside world. Ron is anxious, but content with his crumbling house, his sprawling, grassy yard surrounded by trees, his winding driveway that leads to the road he will never travel. Ron has found his happiness internally, and refuses to fumble around seeking impossible connections from anyone other than himself.

The truth is, by her calculations, Julia isn't even supposed to still be alive. She decided a long time ago to live life day by day, because imagining herself past the age of

25 scared her too much and just in general seemed impossible. But now she's at 27 and time keeps ticking, but she can't live day by day enough to muster up the emotions necessary for a drive from Florida to Virginia in her dead uncle's car.

So instead she skips dinner, vomits in the mechanical train bathroom and buys a ginger ale from the snack car bartender. Something about the booths in that part of the train make her feel more in control of her body. Unlike the recliners, which insist upon specific contours in the back and seat, these vinyl benches demand nothing but a seated position. Julia can prop her back against the window and stretch her legs out into the 49 aisle, plant her feet on the floor and spread magazines out over the table, or kick off her shoes and balance her toes on the bench across from her. For most of the evening, the car is quiet. People are pacing the train or eating dinner, and every few minutes Julia lays her palms against the table and closes her eyes. Over the course of an hour, she begins to find the unsteadiness more of a gentle rocking; it lulls her in and out of happy, delicious sleep.

But as the after-dinner crowd starts trickling in to stake out board games and viewing spots for that night's movie, she feels the shakings and vibrations more, and begins to suspect someone will call attention to her isolation within the crowd. It's as half of the I Spy group slides into the bench across from her, not even asking if they can share her booth, that she gathers her things and starts to head back to her seat. But then she remembers how uncomfortable that seat was, the pangs of nausea and the unyielding flatness of the window against the side of her head, and she darts down the narrow stairwell to the smoker's lounge, feeling around in her purse to get a grip on her lighter.

After dinner Derek resumes pacing. But he finds most of the other passengers to be restless from the sugar rush dessert brings, and he is annoyed trying to fight through the crowds making their way to the snack car for that evening's movie, something terrible that the ticket agent told him "looked real cute."

In the bottom of his carry-on duffel bag is a crushed pack of Marlboro Lights, and though it's for emergencies and drunken nights only, the timelessness of trains makes him think the rules don't apply. His own personal rules, that is. "Smoking Restricted to 50

Designated Areas" signs are still posted on every car, so he pushes a quarter of the way through the snack car and finds the stairs down to the smoker's lounge.

The lounge takes up half the car, and is enclosed by acrylic glass on all sides. An elderly gentleman in a brown suit sits in a comer, tapping his cigar against the edge of his chair, eyes closed, humming a quiet song of contentment to himself, unaware of the boy in the other comer and the girl walking through the door.

The girl has a cigarette in her mouth already, but is distracted, fumbling through her bag for something. The boy makes no moves to offer her a light, he simply looks on, amused, as she intercepts a trail of saliva extending from the tip of her cigarette to her mouth. As she finds what she is looking for, she looks up and sees she is not alone; she blushes as she notices the brown-suited man in the comer and slides into a chair near the door. Instinctively she shields her lighter from the non-existent wind and, eyes closed, takes a long first drag. The boy waits until she looks up. A nod of acknowledgement, a moment of eye contact, a smile. PENNY AND THE END OF THE WORLD

Penny's from Pennsylvania, so she leaves out "to be" after "needs." "This carpet needs vacuumed," she'll tell me. "The dishes need washed." It took me a while to figure out why these sentences sounded funny, so I would just go about the chore confused, the words rolling around in my mind. Now I'll vacuum the carpet, or wash the dishes, but mutter the corrected sentence under my breath as I begin.

Most people who move around a lot either don't pick up on regional slang or dialects at all, or they just hold on to one that came in at a formidable point in their speech development. Penny, however, picked up on everything she heard. She'll tell me a story in a harsh Boston accent and finish it off with a moral as she slips into a slow

Southern drawl, calling me "child" and shaking her head as she nods off to sleep.

Dad and I call her Penny, but her birth certificate lists her name as Pennsylvania, believe it or not. Her mother was a carnie and her father was my grandfather. Penny's mom sold cotton candy but stopped for a few years to settle in Pennsylvania with relatives after she went into labor on the midway at the state fair. This particular carnival garnered a lot of business from this particular state, and the story is that Penny was conceived after a church fair in Bethlehem eight months before they came rolling back into the area. My dad assumes, from what he's pieced together, that Grandpa had started working in town right before he met Penny's mom, but was gone by the time she gave birth to his child.

We found out about Penny ten years ago, a couple of weeks after my grandfather's funeral. My dad and his brother always knew they had siblings scattered

51 52 about the country, but Penny was a surprise because she was the oldest. Aunt Janice, my father's half-sister, was sixty-five at the time, but Penny was sixty-seven. Grandpa's death sparked a genealogy search, a quest to find answers they'd been too polite to ask him. They spent months researching possible younger siblings, remembering chunks of their childhoods when Grandpa hadn't been around. They didn't know he'd had a life before marrying Janice's mother at the age of twenty-two. They didn't know about

Penny.

Penny had lost the use of her legs to polio as a child, and was confined to a wheelchair. She had spent the last couple of decades living back in Pennsylvania, after brief lives all over the continent, at the heels of her mother, learning what she called "the trade." She liked me right away. She scared me to death.

I had joined my dad on his trip to Pennsylvania; it was to be the first time either of us had met his sister. He takes care of his siblings, even his half siblings, and though he is the fourth oldest out of ten (that we know of), he acts as a big brother to everyone. So when he saw Penny's living conditions, found out she was surviving in a cramped studio apartment in the most run-down Pittsburgh neighborhood, without a caretaker or nurse, he leapt into action. He barely had time to give her a hug and introduce himself before he was on the phone, looking into condos, nurses, and flights to take her back to Florida with us.

"Jaclyn," he whispered to me while he was on hold. "Find out when she last ate.

Make sure she eats something. Start cleaning up and pack some clothes. We'll send for the rest of this stuff later." 53

He spoke the word "stuff' with an air of disgust, and I could see why. Penny's only decorations were a four-foot tall statue of crying elephants and a couple of dollar­ store picture frames with cellophane still over the Plexiglass protecting the prints. The

8"xl0" hanging on the wall held a black and white photo of a man and a woman standing in front of a ferris wheel. They displayed stoic expressions and reminded me of the couple in "American Gothic," minus the pitchfork and farmhouse. The other was even older, and this one now sits on the nightstand in Penny's Miami bedroom. I now know it to be of Penny, sitting on her mother's lap at the age of four, laughing so hard, she tells me, she remembers having to change her "trousers."

I sat on the decaying brown couch opposite Penny's chair and couldn't help but make fierce eye contact, though I had never spoken to someone in a wheelchair before and was frightened. I was just 15 at the time, an only child still coping with the fact that her mother had run off and left her, and I didn't quite have the caring family instinct my father had. Penny weighed about 300 pounds, because she got no exercise. I had nothing in common with her, and didn't know what to do. So we sat in silence for a minute or two, while I thought a range of inappropriate questions. Why did she have a couch if she never got out of her chair? How did she even get the couch, or any of the other furniture, moved in? The only thought I instantly dismissed was that Penny, unlike the younger, hipper aunts and uncles we had discovered, was disrupting my life, and I felt bad that my dad saw it as his obligation to now take care of this cripple. Of course I wouldn't mention that then. I was trying to figure out how to ask when she last ate without being rude and accidentally calling her fat, when she spoke. 54

"They say it doesn't end in a bang."

The most striking difference between Penny and myself is that she is obsessed with the end. The end of the world, the end of the movie, the end of hurricane season.

She just counts down. We moved her into Grandpa's Miami Beach condo, which he'd left to us, just after Christmas. We spent her first New Year's in Florida there watching the ball drop, and of course this was just another opportunity for her to dwell on finality.

My dad uncorked a bottle of champagne a few minutes before midnight so we would each have a drink in our hands when it was time, a tradition we'd had since I'd turned 13. I was busy amusing myself with plastic noisemakers, but Penny was giggling and practicing the countdown. "Ten, nine, eight." Then she stopped, and started again to get a better pace. "Ten ... nine ... eight ... seven ... six ... five ... four ... three ... two ... one. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One," slie whispered.

I looked at the clock, and it still showed three minutes to go. "It's not time yet. Is it time yet?"

"Almost," she said.

My dad handed me a glass of champagne. "Getting a little practice in there,

Penny?" He winked at me. "Counting down isn't too hard, but can you say your ABCs backwards?"

"Seriously, Penny. Wait until they start on TV."

"The countdown they show on TV is the countdown to the beginning of the new 55 year," Penny said, wheeling around and waving her hand at my dad's offer of a drink.

"I'm countin' down to the end of the old year, man."

I told Penny that I wasn't a man. I was sixteen, and her niece. I used to think when she talked nonsense like that, she was confused or suffering from some form of dementia no one had detected yet. Now I wish that were the case.

Since reluctantly moving to Miami so family could look after her, Penny's been watching a lot of the stoner/surfer movies from the '80s and '90s on the satellite dish we gave her for Christmas. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Dazed and Confused, and

Clueless are some of her favorites, at least as far as I can tell from the weird things I hear her say. But her use of this vernacular is not completely honed, and usually sounds simply awkward, like the speech of a child trying to talk like an adult - but in reverse.

One day I stopped in after school to quickly drop off some leftovers, and I was greeted with, "Dude! You should have seen The Price is Right today! One chick won a new car, then hit the $1.00 mark when she spun the wheel, and her bid was so close in the

Showcase Showdown that she won both packages! A yacht and a trip to Toronto!"

"Toronto?" I must have crinkled my eyebrows as I do when Penny gets excited about something unusual, because she began defending herself.

"Don' knock Toronto, missy. Those kids know what they're doin' up there.

When the rest ofus're plugging our noses waiting for the big hang ten, Toronto's gonna be having a party. That's where all the pure at heart are. Toronto. Did you know no one has ever been raped in Toronto? Never." 56

Most of what Penny says is just lies, plain and simple. It's not her fault. Most

people I've met in their 70s have the personalities they were supposed to have. They can

try to change them in their 20s, their 50s, but by their 70s what they have is what they

have, what they couldn't part with. From the stories I hear, Penny's entire life has just

been walking a fine line between reality and lies, and I never really understood the phrase

"take it with a grain of salt" until I met her. By the time she was eight her mother had

gone back to work and they were on the road with the carnival. The life of the food

vendors is pretty mundane compared to what's around them, but her mother was friends

with everyone. "The mayorette," as Penny likes to call her. As it was, Penny spent some

time with everyone. From the one-armed man that operated the ferris wheel, to the sweet

couple at the lemonade stand that used to bring her jelly beans, Penny was friends with

them all.

At first I was fascinated. On the plane ride back to Florida, just days after I had

met her, she told me to ask her anything, anything I wanted to know about her life. I

asked about her best friend.

"The best friend I ever had was a man called Silus. He breathed fire and

swallowed knives. His parents met when his mother was a spy in Russia and his father

had infiltrated a group of communists to get insider information. She helped him escape when the communists found out about him and tried to kill him. Silus was 32, I was 17,

and he was in love with me."

"His parents were spies?" 57

Penny gazed out the window as she spoke to me, as if she didn't even realize she

was having a conversation. "He took me to the movies one time and tried to kiss me, but his breath smelled like burnt toast."

"Was he born in Russia?"

"We saw Anchors Aweigh together. I kept thinking about just getting up out of my chair and dancing with Gene Kelly. I figured if he can dance with a mouse, he can dance with a cripple." She turned back and grinned, daring me to question the story of a cripple. I've found that when she avoids a subject or a question, she's either making something up or has just realized the story she is passing on was a lie when it was originally told to her. When I stopped asking about the communists, she started talking about Armageddon.

"Of course it doesn't matter. We're going to opposite sides, me and Silus, when it's time to set everything straight."

"Oh," I said.

"You can be friends with sinners here, but they'll split us up at the rapture."

"Yeah, I've heard that," I said. My dad was completely comfortable with her, but

I couldn't contradict a stranger. But I'd never had any kind of schooling in religion, so just chose to make up my own beliefs. The end of the world did not factor into them.

This was our first in-depth conversation on the subject, even though she did most of the talking. It basically set the tone for what life with Penny was going to be like.

She's always prepared for the end of everything. She's always left one suitcase packed 58

with essentials for the day when she decides she's done with Miami, Or, as she puts it, the

day Miami decides it's done with her.

My dad made me go to Penny's after school three times a week during high

school. I didn't so much mind having to take care of her, but I always did it wrong.

We'd both go over on Sundays and he would follow up on all the chores he had assigned me.

"The orange juice goes in the blue pitcher and the grapefruit in the green, Jackie," he yelled into the next room as he peered into the refrigerator one day.

Penny was teaching me card shuffling tricks in front of the TV. She put her fan of reds and blacks back into a pile and slammed them down on her TV tray. "I told her I like it that way, Paul! It makes more sense for the orange to go in the green and the grapefruit in the blue."

He ignored Penny and leaned against the doorway separating us as he addressed me directly. "You know how they like to change up the home healthcare nurses. They get confused if you don't give them a system. They have to have it all straight if a new person comes in."

"Yes, god forbid Penny dies one day from accidentally drinking more than her recommended dosage of grapefruit juice."

"She's your aunt, Jaclyn. Respect, remember? Aunt Penny."

Penny never used to care that I didn't use this formal title, but when I left for college my dad got to her. He started going over more and more, and when I dropped out 59

and moved back home the deal was I could stay at my dad's rent free if I looked in after

Penny each day. In high school I'd gotten the impression that I wasn't sent there to

watch her as much as I was sent to be babysat by her. Even though I bring my own child

over when I go take care of her now, this feeling has only grown stronger. It doesn't help that my father has since convinced her that young people need to look up to their elders.

It amazes me, as narrow-minded and stubborn as Penny is, how easily she can be influenced.

By the time I moved back home I finally had the nerve to tell Penny I didn't believe in Armageddon. I saw her every day and felt I wasn't being honest about who this person was, coming over, buying her groceries, washing her clothes, shoving vitamins down her throat. Besides that, I knew she couldn't go anywhere. Not only was she completely dependent on me and my family, but she liked me, and nothing I did seemed to change that.

Telling her I didn't believe the world was going to end in a torment of fire, separating the angels from the unfaithful, the meek from the cocksure - well, it felt like I was telling her I didn't believe in oxygen or puppies. Even as the words, "You know, I think you may be wrong ... " were slipping past my lips, I wanted to take them back.

There seemed to be something so ridiculous and silly about contradicting someone half a century older than me. But it didn't matter, because Penny didn't take my statement seriously anyway.

"You don't think He's trying to tell us something?" She didn't need to say anything else or provide any support for her argument, because I felt foolish enough 60

already. Nevertheless, she went on. "I heard about a swarm of locusts in South America.

It's doubling in size every year. Man, I'd hate to be on the receiving end of some jacked­

up grasshoppers."

Penny's obsessions aren't limited to Armageddon. Her latest is about the cleanliness of her house. It seems her need to be prepared for the end has extended into other concerns as well, expecting that (I can only assume) Jeb Bush or Jon Bon Jovi will stop by some day, on a charity tour of the homes of the last surviving polio victims.

The only thing Penny isn't prepared for is her own death, at least her own individual death. She insists that she's going to be around for the end of the world, and the past few years have only made that insistence stronger and louder.

I went to her house after the terrorist attacks of 2001 to attempt to pull her television away from her. My dad was concerned that her already weak state would be worsened by watching the constant news reports and thinking about explosions and death, but he didn't want to be there to see her reacting this way. So, as usual, he shoved some money in my hand as a reward for doing an unpleasant Penny chore, and he disappeared into his room before I had even left the house.

I was appalled to find Penny parked in front of the TV, remote in hand, with a huge grin on her face. I eased up a bit when I realized the grin was not because of what happened, but because she had been waiting for irreversible proof to shove in my face, and finally had it. 61

"And you said He wasn't trying to tell us something ... " she said proudly, as if

there was no way that event could be seen in any other light.

I tried to ignore the comment and focus on the task at hand, but I couldn't.

"Okay, Penny. What is 'He' trying to tell us?"

"We're being punished for worshipping false gods."

"What false gods?"

"Well, Allah, for one."

I tried to explain that a Christian God would not send followers of Allah to spread the message that Allah was a false god, but she had already made up her mind.

I had the same dead end conversations with Penny when hurricanes started

coming in swarms as big as locust plagues and a tsunami wiped out almost whole countries on the other side of the world. Each time she insists these catastrophic events mean some almighty power is slowly killing off the planet and destroying our civilization to prepare us for the day the skies open up and swallow us whole.

I tell her the sky has already opened up. "It's called the ozone layer, and the wars and floods just mean we have to stop driving gas-powered cars."

"You're right, the sky has already opened up. It's going to be sooner than I thought."

My least favorite chore for Penny is when she decides to surprise me by buying a new piece of cheap furniture over the Internet, and I have to assemble it. She'll park herself nearby while I struggle with a flathead screwdriver in a Phillips screw, and she 62 tells me stories interspersed with unnecessary advice about construction. Today the air conditioner is broken, it's a computer desk, and I tell her what she can do with her advice.

"My father was a carpenter." Another lie, but I'm going to take the bait because I haven't heard her mention my grandfather since the day we first met.

"Your father was a hit man, Penny." Realizing the absurdity of this conversation already, that my truth sounds sexier than her lie, I press on. "He was a rum runner during

Prohibition when he was just a kid, then he was a hit man."

"Hit men are never just hit men. They have to have real jobs too most of the time."

I tell her I'm sorry, but she doesn't know what she's talking about because she never met her father and she was conceived during a one-night stand, just like me. She gets quiet, and I remember the dollhouse Grandpa made me for my sixth birthday, how it had a working manual elevator and an exact miniature replica of my bedroom set. Even my dad, who was closest to him, never said much about what Grandpa did for a living.

"He did odd jobs, you know, off and on. He made it through." That's all he'll say.

I ask Penny how she knows her father was a carpenter, and she says her mother told her. They were young, they were in love, they'd known each other for years. This doesn't add up, and Penny quickly changes the subject. This is the only time I've ever gotten a sense of Penny being more than just blood. It's the only time she's ever expressed that she even cares.

My dad always says that she's a connection. "We're not just doing the right thing in treating her as part of the family. She just is part of the family." 63

Everything gets to Penny, and I hate that. I'll admit it. But what I hate more is

that she is the only thing that gets to me. My life revolves around pleasing her, as if she were my child or husband. And she's made damn sure that if the end of the world does come, she knows who the people in her life are going to be thinking of. "My Aunt Penny always said this was how it was going to happen," I'll preach to all the others who were left behind with me. "She was right. I hate that."

Penny swears that one day she's going to write down her life and share it with the world. I'm to be the typist. But something about her story just bores me. She lived on a farm for eight years, she sold cotton candy for forty. She's survived polio and lived everywhere. But she's so blase about it all that I feel I'm just watching a fantastical movie about things that never happened.

"But that's the point, you see," she says, throwing my argument back at me.

"You can't talk about hardship and end with a bang. Because you just have no idea how it's all going to go down. You gotta take it as it comes. Child, ifl had a nickel for the stories you don't know the ends to." THORNS

Yell ow roses are for friendship, he said. That's what the woman at the flower

shop told me. And after I finished talking about you she said, Get a dozen red too.

She was just trying to sell you more flowers, I told him. He's always a sucker for symbolism.

I was going to get three dozen anyway, he said, because we've known each other three years today. I thought they would cheer you up.

So why does it matter what color they are?

I was going to get three dozen white, because they're your favorites, right? But I just got a dozen of those, and a dozen yellow, and a dozen red.

He arranged thirty-five of the flowers in a vase and I stretched out on the couch conducting an imaginary orchestra with a yellow one. He wants me to get better. All my friends do. I guess I do too.

Anyway, he said, I told her we'd been friends for so long, so she said yellow roses, yellow roses for friendship. She asked me a lot about you. I told her the flowers were just because. I told her flowers make people happy.

I don't suffer from sadness, I said, plucking a petal from the yellow rose.

He kept talking, kept taking flowers out of the vase and cramming them back in. I didn't tell her you'd been sad because I didn't want her to think it's about me. You said it's not, right? You're not sad because of me?

I'm not sad because of you.

I don't think she would have cared, I mean, I don't think it's any of her business.

64 65

I pulled another petal off and rubbed it against my cheek. He saw me this time,

and flinched at the exact moment I heard the tiny snap.

He walked over and put the tri-colored arrangement on the table next to me. Then

he lifted my feet and sat down on the couch. I know, and I think he does too, that we

can't go back to the way things were before. So I guess we'll have to stay here forever.

Get married, I guess.

He kept talking. I told her all about you and she said to get red for the third

dozen. I forgot to ask her what red meant.

I turned around and put my head in his lap. Thanks for the flowers, I murmured.

I wish I knew what red meant. I got white because they're your favorites, and yellow for friendship, but she told me to get red and I forgot to ask why.

Thanks for the flowers, I said again.

Oh, you're welcome, he said. Maybe I'll go look it up. Maybe I'll call the flower

store tomorrow. You probably know. Do you know what red roses mean?

I think they mean love, I said.

Well I guess that's appropriate, he said. Makes sense, he said. FLOW

Chattahoochee means painted rock. They think. Chattooga means rocky river, so

I assumed chat would mean river, and then I'd be able to make some sense of everything.

But all the words are Creek and all the people not, so I'm left not knowing who to trust.

I'm on the Chattanooga now, bumping my way downstream in a bright pink vinyl inner tube, because this is the industry here in Helen, Georgia, tubing and tourism.

I'm having fun, but I've made a conscious effort to not try so hard. I wanted this time to think, so I close my eyes and curse the strangers who brought walking sticks, ready to push themselves off rocks if they get stuck. From my perspective, the world is packed with people, all getting in each other's way, sacrificing each other for space, room to breathe. I learned long ago that when you get stuck, all you need to do is wait for the current to change or someone to come along, and you'll get bumped soon enough. I've been in this river about three dozen times since I was five years old, so I know that sometimes it can be a blast and sometimes you spend the entire journey back to the outpost being disappointed and wondering where the hell your family went.

I lost my family as soon as the bus dropped us upstream, just as I had intended to, and now I'm just trying to be mindful of my thoughts. It's July fourth so there's more people on the river than usual, but there's a drought, so there's less water. There's one large rapid my sisters and I used to call the "waterfall" when we were younger, and even through the drought it's still intimidating. There are two sides: one bumpy, but less steep,and one a straight shot down. The latter is infinitely more fun, and it's always best to steer yourself in that direction.

66 67

It's just before this fall that I get stuck on a slanted rock. And all I want to do is

get past the fall, get to the point where I can cross my legs and fall asleep. So I begin to

shimmy forward, a little more, rocking myself back and forth to get unstuck, trying to let

the water rush under me and carry me ahead. And just as I'm slanted forward for what

should be the last time, a woman with a child tethered to her crashes into me from behind

and I flip, somersaulting into the water, the top of my head scraping the bottom of the

river. By the time I resurface, my tube is downstream and I can't breathe for the water up

my nose.

When I return home everything will have changed. I'll find out this trip was my

one last week of naivety, of not knowing a friend had sacrificed me for someone we both wanted. As I begin a new phase of my life, I think back to this moment in the river when, no matter my intentions, I can get turned upside down, lose my bearings, and be stranded, trying to catch my breath. ROCK GATE

I was thirteen the first time I visited Coral Castle. My family took a day trip

down from our Fort Lauderdale suburb, reaching our destination just north of the city of

Homestead. The property sits off US-1, positioned perfectly for a tourist trap: smack

between The Everglades and the Homestead Air Reserve Base. The people who run

Coral Castle are the ones who named it; they're the ones who market it as a "sculpture

garden and tribute to lost love." But I know it used to be called Rock Gate Park, and it

used to be someone's home.

On my first trip, I was interested in the mystery, the physics and metaphysics that had gone into creating it. Science and fantasy collided for me here. Still clinging onto my childhood, I saw Coral Castle as a fort or a treehouse - something I almost could have

built myself. But I returned this past Christmas, and I saw it for what it was. I saw that I

could not have built it myself - I don't have what it takes. I saw it through the eyes of

someone who knows full well what kind of obsession could make a man spend a lifetime waiting for someone who had rejected him, could make him look crazy trying to prove his worth.

The story goes something like this. Ed Leedskalnin was twenty-six and living in his home country of Latvia when he was engaged to Agnes, ten years younger than he.

He called her his "Sweet Sixteen." But he was blind to the concerns she had about their marriage, and was shocked when, the night before, she called the whole thing off. Even in Europe, 1912, a place and time I imagine as more accepting of age differences, Agnes was distraught at the idea of marrying a man while she was just a girl.

68 69

Years later, Ed quietly moved to North America, working in the lumber industry

in Canada, California, and Texas before tuberculosis forced him to move to a more tropical climate. This was seven or eight years after the would-be wedding, but he thought he still had a chance. He still had his love, of course; in fact, I'm willing to believe his obsession was growing. Absence makes the heart grow anxious.

I am familiar with this anxiety, and I want to imagine Ed had a plan. That he dreamed of Coral Castle before he created it, that he knew it was perfect for Agnes and just had to figure out the details.

But that's not the way it went. Ed fell into Coral Castle. He bought some property in Florida City, not far from Homestead, because it was not near the beach and therefore in his price range. In a quest for materials to build a house, he realized he was sitting on a bed of what he thought was fossilized coral. We now know it was oolitic limestone, but coral is more romantic, more Floridian, and I always want to forget the place I always build up in my mind is really just made of rock. Ed began quarrying the land and cutting giant slabs of rock out of the earth to create a fortress -which he later moved, all by himself, over to Homestead. It's still there today.

Even now that stretch of US-1 looks like Old Florida; there are new shopping centers and a gas station right across the street, but the weeds and trees sprawling out into the highway make it seem entirely possible that at any minute a gator might just attempt to sprint across out in front of your car. Even through several population booms and a bit of growth from the Air Base, the draining of the Everglades, and the invention of air conditioning that made habitation bearable, I can still imagine Ed here, exploring the land 70

and making it what he needed it to be. Take away the strip malls and reservists and I can

see how Ed was able to build his castle in relative peace and quiet, often working at night

- for the cooler temperatures, I imagine, and not for extraterrestrial help that so often

finds its way into explanations and myths of this place.

Ed was new to the country. He lived alone. He was 5'0" and weighed just a hundred pounds. He dug rocks that weighed nearly as much as he did out of the ground late at night to build a house for a sixteen-year-old girl who had already rejected him once and lived across the ocean. I cannot help but admire him.

I've been jilted too. In the year and a half before this past trip to Coral Castle, I'd been preoccupied with Jeff. Not his presence, even. Most of the time he wasn't around at all. And in his absence, whether it be a month that we weren't speaking or just a week we were too busy to have drinks after work, I built him up in my mind, and projected onto him who I wanted him to be. I loved the potential I saw in him to be someone I could take care of, and I told myself I loved him for who he really was, too. I let myself continue to love him long after he began seeing my closest friend, tearing apart my friendships to both of them.

Friends speculate I never really loved him, that I just loved who I wanted him to be, and maybe they're right. I sometimes assume Ed felt the same way about Sweet

Sixteen, that he only saw in her potential, not who she was. But only Ed and I could know how we really felt, and none of that matters anyway. What matters is that I spent a year trying to make Jeff love me, and six months trying to get over him. I am the poor 71

man's Ed, a girl whose obsession took the form of empty wine bottles and sobbing late­

night phone calls. I went on living my life, because that's what I was supposed to do, but

if society had allowed me I would have bought a piece of land and chiseled away at

limestone until my hands bled.

I know I'm not the only person who has ever suffered at the hands of love. On my family's most recent trip to Coral Castle, I observed that most of us had been a part of

some kind of dangerous love, and had proven it. My mother left my father for his best friend, and my father proved his love through punching the man, through dating other women and hurting them the way he'd been hurt. Through preaching to me to this day to not put my trust in anyone but family. Everyone has the potential to hurt. My sister

Sarah's obsession took the form of depression - of losing a scholarship and twenty pounds because her high school boyfriend became her best friend's college boyfriend.

And my sister Erin has recently been the hurter. On our trip to Homestead she brought with her and held hands with the best friend of her most recent ex-boyfriend- two weeks after she'd moved out of their apartment

Walking around Coral Castle, I see these two as a reflection of what's been done to me. One of Ed's constructions was a "Love Chair," designed so two people could sit in the same seat and face each other, instead of being side-by-side. The two seats are carved out of one stone, but at a 180-degree angle to one. My family and I joked around with it, taking pictures and sitting in it wrong. But when, a while later, I looked over to see Erin and Chris holding hands and gazing at each other while someone else took a picture of them, I spiraled into my role of sufferer. I wanted to tell them that Ed did not 72

intend for this chair to be for Sweet Sixteen and her new husband, but for himself and his love. I cannot look at that chair now without thinking of the people who have wronged me.

Most people think Ed was crazy, and they wonder how he could have thought this monument would be appealing to any young bride. I can see it that way, and for a long time I did. But then I suspend my disbelief and imagine that Ed genuinely saw this as the best he could do for her. And what woman doesn't want that? She hadn't asked him for anything but to leave, and he did that. I suspect he thought that his leaving would make her want him - he had fulfilled her one request, after all. There was a year of my life when I would have done anything for Jeff, gotten on a plane to Vegas and eloped in the middle of the night if he'd asked me to. I'd drop all my other friends to spend time with him; twice I let him sleep on my couch when he was too drunk to make it all the way home after a party. I told myself! did these things for him. But he never asked me to. I was doing them for me.

Ed needed to build his castle, but I don't know who he thought the building was for. Maybe he needed something to occupy him, idle hands and whatnot. And maybe he really did think news of his castle would stretch across the ocean and reach Agnes, and she would discover this was what she wanted. There are also bordering-on-creepy accounts of his relationship to the neighborhood children. He let them tour the castle-in­ progress for a nickel apiece. Maybe he was just doing this for show.

Today the charge is more like twelve dollars and change. We come here as tourists; we pay our fee. We laugh at the story and marvel at the physical. We run our 73

hands over the table in the shape of Florida with Lake Okeechobee carved out in the middle, right where it should be. The lake can be what it's needed to be; the written tour claims "it could be used as a finger bowl, bird bath, or punch bowl." We recline in the reading chairs - each positioned in a way that would provide the best sunlight in the morning, at noon, and in the early afternoon. The genius of this is often pointed out; often ignored is the fact that chairs not made out of coral would be more portable and could be moved to suit the various stages of light throughout the day.

But the story is still creeping behind all the stone. Love is everywhere here, and I can't help but see it. Even in the sculptures where Ed proved himself to be craziest, I know that lurking behind the coral is love, all that love for Sweet Sixteen.

And there's plenty of crazy to be had here. The tour guide lists every sculpture on the grounds, most of them useable. "On top of this block of coral is the first rocking chair Ed built. He was very proud of it, and placed it where people were sure to see it."

The rocking chair is made completely out of coral and positioned about seven feet off the ground. It rocks, and is an appropriate size for sitting like all the other chairs on the property, but there's no way to get to it. Up on its pedestal it can't be reached or enjoyed; it doesn't serve its purpose.

The coral sundial tells us to notice time sinking lower on the horizon. Ed admonished those who asked questions about his process, both in scientific pieces like this and in the actual construction of the castle. He would say that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of physics could have built this place. 74

But not everyone could. Surely Ed had to have more than book smarts; he had to

have the drive to do all of this. Many people may know physics, but not everyone knows

about this kind of love.

Even the most disturbing of pieces, the Repentance Corner, is well thought out and made with a concrete use in mind. In one small slab of corner are two openings - one the height of a child and one the height of Sweet Sixteen, the tour says, "in case she

became sassy." Ed would wedge the repentant in with a block of wood while their face was stuck in the hole, sit down in front of them, and talk to them. The guide goes on to mention that Ed did not make an opening for himself, and editorializes, "No wonder he never married." This judgment by the people who own the place now upsets me. I feel instantly protective of Ed, and want to tell them to not joke around with something so serious as unrequited love.

Ed was odd, but he was smart. He had a lot of big ideas. He wrote pamphlets on everything from magnetic currents and life cycles to social responsibility. In one, entitled

"Sweet Sixteen, Domestic and Political Views," he describes his views on virginity. His belief that new husbands should have experience but new wives should be pure leads to only one possible solution - the brides' mothers should deflower the grooms before the wedding.

I remember this story from visiting Coral Castle when I was younger, one of the first times I'd head the word virgin. But it wasn't until this visit that I began making my own assumptions, piecing together a new piece of information - that Ed did not get along with Sweet Sixteen's mother - to this old story. The chair Ed designed for his future 75

mother-in-law in his throne room was meant to be the most uncomfortable one in the

whole castle.

Everything about the castle is a mystery, something you have to piece together as

you discover, something that only makes sense in retrospect. The people who lived

around Ed never understood him, and yet visitors have the arrogance to think they know

him, because they took a tour or read a book. But what we can learn from his story is that

no one can ever know anyone. Ed never knew Agnes, really, never knew what she liked

or wanted. And I'll never know the ways I never knew Jeff, and even ifl did know him he was never who I needed him to be.

Ed's story ends just as mysteriously as it began. When he was sixty-four, he put a

sign on the door of Rock Gate saying "Going to the Hospital." He took a bus to the hospital where he died in his sleep. He died alone the way he lived his life - quietly, privately. The only way he received attention was by requesting no attention. When he was building the castle, he wouldn't explain his process to anyone, and as a result people were more and more curious. Even today visitors and the private company that runs the sight make up their own interpretations, comparing Coral Castle to Stonehenge and the

Great Pyramids, suggesting Ed's appreciation for astronomy was because of his appreciation for the extraterrestrial life that helped him.

Years ago a local South Florida news channel found Sweet Sixteen. I remember watching the report. She was white-haired and indignant in the interview. They invited 76 to pay her way to Florida so she could see her castle, and all the love Ed had for her. She refused.

I did not come here because I wanted to be amused. I did not come to wonder at the telescope or sundial, or to sit in the "too big, too small, just right" chairs Ed based on the story of Goldilocks. I came because I too know something about obsession. I want to talk to Ed, to tell him that I admire his commitment to love. I cannot do what he did.

The other day a friend told me she saw Jeff. She told me that she was mean to him, but I couldn't bring myself to ask what that meant. I was afraid the interaction meant more in her head than it did in reality, that all she'd done was pass him on the street without saying hello when really she should have screamed at him on my behalf. I like to imagine she reminded him of how much he hurt me and that she warned him against living his life without remembering me every day. Someone needs to tell him that I haven't forgotten, because I don't have the energy or resolve to build him a castle.

I can't spend every day of the rest of my life being in love with him. My friend's mere mention of his name was more than I could stand, because I know I need to move on if I want to make my life more than just a monument to him.

Most days, now, I think of Jeff in the abstract, with words like heartache and regret. Ed lived with his love for Sweet Sixteen concretely, and his obsession took a concrete form. How often must he have seen her face in the stone? But he didn't chisel destructively, trying to hurt her for all the hurt she caused him. He must have been in love with obsession almost as much as he was in love with Agnes. I see him now, a 77 feeble Michelangelo, searching through the layers of rock for his David - begging the stone to reveal her, and speak to her. In the castle he turned her into something permanent, that would always be with him - he made her exactly what he needed her to be. HAIR

Without realizing it, I've written my life's history through hair. It's not difficult for me to see it as a metaphor for change, for ends, for loss. I'll bet most people have something like this, something they notice more than others do, more than they notice other things. If I were a different person I might see my life as a soundtrack, anchoring the major events of the past twenty-five years to lyrics and melodies. Or I might remember food, the meals that have sustained me, the way learning to cook taught me about math and sharing. If I'd ever had a relationship, I might remember the great loves of my life, be able to anchor my life to something meaningful, or something permanent.

I remember hair.

Dye-able, cut-able, fragile. The disappearing dead skin coming from the top of my head, from the top of my mother's head, from the top of my sister's head.

Superficial, yes, but comforting. Get a bad haircut, and it gets better in a month or two.

It comes back. Back to you. All yours. Clinging to your head for life, relying on you for maintenance and health, it's one of the first things people notice when they describe you.

Well-shaped eyebrows. Five o'clock shadow. Blonde. An expression of who you are.

This is what I cling to.

This year I cut my hair, quite drastically. What used to be a haphazard mass of waves is now shorter in the back, longer in the front, parted in the middle. Bangs hang straight over my forehead, making this the first time my hair has followed the trend of the day and not its own personal whim. This drastic change got me attention I was looking for: a boy I'd been noticing finally noticed me, colleagues passed me in the hallways and

78 79 later apologized profusely for not recognizing me. But my sister noted the biggest change of all; from the front, my new hair framed my face the way my mother's hair framed hers during her life. I had not only become a different person. I had become my mother.

Often I try to pinpoint what it is that makes me look more like her than my sisters do, even though I have my Dad's chubby cheeks and my Grandma's blue eyes.

Whenever I get a good look at myself it's in photographs or the mirror, so what I can surmise is this: like my mother, I can pose like it's nobody's business. I look most like her in pictures, especially family pictures where my arms are around my sisters, proud of my family, protective.

Leaving out a few awkward teen years when I would smile so wide my eyes would turn into two small slits, or the years before that when the braces on my teeth meant I didn't smile at all, I've mastered just how much and when to grin, how to tilt my head, and who to put my arms around. I have my bad pictures, but the trick is to take lots, thousands, and among those there will be a few that define you.

And it's the few that define me that line up so well with the few that define my mom. The smile, sure, the shape of the eyes, but it's when looking at pictures of me as a baby and her as a baby, of me as a five-year-old and her as a five-year-old, of me at high school graduation and her at high school graduation, that I realize our hair darkened at the exact same rate. If you'll look through my shoebox full of photographs you'll see how two toe-headed babies turned into sandy blonde children, turned into light brown adolescents, turned into - in each of these scenarios something is cut short. I haven't 80 reached my late twenties yet, so I haven't grown chocolate brown like my mother did at that age. And since she died at forty-five, I have to wait until after I reach that age to find out how our hair will have grown in our senior years. Will we have grey hair, flecked with black and white, or silver all over like I've always wanted? Will it be coarse and short, or smooth and shoulder-length until our children tell us we're too old for that cut?

Or will I never know? Will the cancer that killed her strip away my hair as well, kill me too and stunt the lives of my future children?

When we lived in the old house, the house where Sarah was a baby, before the divorce and before cancer, my mom had freakishly long hair. She'd had it since she met my Dad, and there's a family joke about her visiting my Dad's brother in the hospital just months after she'd met the family. Uncle Chuck was suffering from temporary amnesia due to electric shock, and as my Mom slowly reintroduced herself to him, he interrupted with, "Can I ask you a personal question?" I imagine him craning his neck around her to see her healthy, straight brown hair hovering around her knees. "How do you go to the bathroom?"

Her hair still brought out those kinds of questions when I was born, when Erin was born, when Sarah was born. Until one day, when I was seven, about a year before we moved, about five years before the divorce. I wasn't told that she was going out to have her haircut, but it was dusk and our Dad stayed home with us while she left with one long braid down her back.

He was sitting on the front porch when I heard her pull up, and I ran outside in my nightgown and bare feet to meet her. Her hair was different in almost every way. 81

Though she didn't lighten it, it looked lighter, both in color and in weight. She had gotten it permanently curled, and sharp, thick bangs now whispered just above her eyebrows. She had cut about ten inches off, and now her hair fell a few inches above her waist.

It wasn't until this year that I gave in and got those same bangs, and not because of any kind of connection to my mother, but because all other kinds of bangs were too difficult for me to manage. The stylist would part my hair to one side and cut a long, angled section hanging down my left cheek, and talk to me about "training" my hair, something I'll never understand. It involves clips or products or bobby pins or something, in addition to a kind of manual dexterity I don't possess. I'd always try for a couple of days and end up holding the bangs back with headbands or clips every day until they'd grown out enough to just look like long layers.

Somehow, my Mom had managed to come straight home from the salon with not a hair out of place, no cowlicks or odd parts in her bangs. They went straight down her forehead, the way they were supposed to, the way that was the style back then. My mom had some kind of magical hair that survived all the years of childbirth, motherhood, playgrounds, birthday parties, without any frizz or messy ponytails. This isn't just my memory; there are pictures to prove it. I couldn't even get through high school with that kind of perfection, that time in my life when all I was supposed to focus on was perfect hair.

I've never given up on striving for that, and have extended my quest for perfection to other things and other people in my life. It's why I procrastinate until I'm in 82 the right frame of mind to do something, why I clean incessantly, why I can't ever stop thinking about anyone I'm attracted to, why for some reason I think I can turn a one-night stand into something more, something perfect.

When my sister was younger, she had thin hair that stuck straight up in the back.

Our mother liked to joke that women at the mall would look down at the stroller and say,

"Why did you do that to her hair?" it eventually thickened out into that pure, perfect hair lucky children can have. When my sister was five, she announced, "I want my hair to look like a boy's." Our mother did not hesitate to grant this wish.

She had always told us the story of when she was twelve and her mother made her get a pixie cut. Every time she told this story she explained what a pixie cut was, that it was popular in the '60s but that she hated it. She didn't have any say in this style, and to this day my Grandma swears she didn't know she was scarring her daughter emotionally by chopping off her hair. She was just encouraging a style that was more manageable and convenient. I believe my mother considered her hair to be her source of femininity, especially as a girl, but more importantly it was one of very few decisions she was allowed to make for herself. When she couldn't go out with her friends after school because she had to be home to start dinner and watch her little brother, when she couldn't choose what shoes she wore or when she was allowed to date boys, she only had her personal style and her mother had stripped that away.

That is the day, my mother says, she told her mother she was doing whatever she wanted to with her hair, she was going to grow it down to her waist if she wanted, and that when she had kids they could do whatever they wanted with their hair too. 83

One Easter my Mom let me put makeup on all by myself. I was wearing a white dress with big blue and purple flowers; white children's stockings clinging to my skinny white legs. I leaned over the bathroom counter until my nose was almost touching the mirror, the edge of that counter digging into my pudgy stomach. The smell in the room was a mix of sweet powder and my dad's deodorant. That smell of deodorant dominates that bathroom now; it's masculine but medicinal, tinged with alcohol. It was that same bathroom where, seven years later, I'd be crying on the floor because I'd just realized my mother was dead, but this Easter Sunday I was learning to curl my eyelashes.

"Brush your teeth before you put on lipstick," she said, "and curl your eyelashes before you put on mascara." She paused. "When you're old enough to wear mascara, that is."

I was fifteen when my mom was in her first round of chemotherapy, and she went to a seminar co-sponsored by a breast cancer charity and a few different cosmetics companies. I called it something that I thought was clever but that really wasn't clever at all, like the Cancer Patients with Low Self-Esteem Club. My Mom gave me a couple of the products she had been given there and showed me the rest. Included in their gift bags were two sets of false eyelashes. She explained that, unlike the lipstick and nail polish that she could just pass on to me, the eyelashes were necessary to her health and well being; they prevented dust and other airborne particles from blinding her.

It was that same year that her body reacted so strongly to the chemo that she didn't have to shave her armpits anymore. She and her brothers took a picture of their three bald heads and sent it to my Grandma for Mother's Day. I used to run my hand up 84 and down her arm and think about hairless sphinx cats, imagining they smelled like

Shalimar perfume and had skin like soft bronze leather.

The worse my hair is, the less anxious I am about losing it. In college I let my hair get so damaged that when I went in for a trim, seven inches had to be taken off just to remove the dead hair and split ends. What was left fell to my waist. Two months later

I went back and cut off eleven more inches, donating them to children who needed wigs.

It was four or five years after our Mom died that my Dad decided to clean out the garage. We'd brought over a lot of boxes from the townhome my Mom and stepfather shared, and we'djust stacked them in piles, knowing most of the contents were bank statements from the '80s, old paperbacks and magazines, birthday cards we didn't care to read. One day, though, the garage reached critical mass and we had to start to throw things away.

I can't remember which of us first pulled out the envelope, decorated in purple and pink paisleys. All I remember is it dropping to the kitchen floor as its contents spilled out, the three of us scrambling away from it, shrieking, giggling. The envelope contained our mother's hair. The hair from that night that it was cut short, or shorter, the long braid that had hung over her perfectly postured spine that night at the old house. I picked up the hair, making jokes as I held it up to my head, petting it like a cat, trying to straighten out the crease that had formed from the long braid being folded in half for fifteen years. I threw it in the box of things I wanted to keep but sort through later, and pushed the box underneath a shelf in my bedroom closet. That hair is still there, twelve 85 hundred miles away from where I live now, but still in my Dad's house, just one more lock of hair I don't know what to do with.

I thought about donating it like I'd done with my own, but the more I thought about it the more I realized it wasn't out of charity that I chopped off my hair and sent it away. It was just because I had something to prove. I had gotten so sick of watching makeover shows on TV, where women would come in saying, "I want to keep the length," and then not be able to keep the length, and then cry over five, six inches lost. I couldn't imagine crying over a haircut; it's just hair, and it grows back. It was only when

I started taking care of my hair again that I'd get anxious about haircuts, I'd get annoyed when Christina, my stylist, was on vacation or not working the day I wanted a trim. One of these days I made the mistake of going to a discount strip mall salon, and the cutter there didn't understand what I was asking for, and I cried.

I haven't been to anyone but Christina since, and sometimes I wonder why she never asks what's going on in my life when I sit down and say, "I need a change. Do whatever you want." That's what I did two months ago. I'm not sure I'll ever change my style now. I wonder how jaded she must be to this statement, how many women go to her and expect a new haircut to make their life different.

The day after my mother died went to school, my sister and I stayed home to clean the house and meet our stepfather at the funeral parlor. He walked in with a bag full of clothes and let us know he'd picked out what she was to wear at the viewing, what she was to be cremated in. I guess I don't know if they removed her clothes before subjecting her hairless, naked body to the fire, the body with the fake reconstructed 86

breasts that had been built from stomach fat before she went into remission, the blank breasts that never got their new false nipples. I don't remember if she was wearing her false eyelashes.

My stepfather had brought that bag full of clothes - a jumper, I think, which she'd grown fond of wearing during her illness, and a T-shirt to go under it. Or maybe it was a green top with a sheer blouse over it, and jeans. I don't remember. I remember we valued comfort. And that's why he brought her headscarf, instead of one of her wigs, because she never wore her wigs anyway. They were too itchy. In the end my mother never really showed much concern for her femininity, and maybe she never had.

I may have many fond and not-so-fond memories of hair, but my own hair certainly doesn't affect me. I've settled into a comfort with my current hairstyle, and can't imagine it different than how it looks right now. It will probably look like this tomorrow, and the next day. And I know some day it will change. But there's something comforting about knowing it's always there, to fall in front of my face when I need it or stop things from falling into my eyes, always clinging together to protect me. STAINED

The night Sara and Michael broke up she drew on him, using a Sharpie to stain

his chest with the weeks they'd known each other. She'd asked; he'd allowed. She'd

taken pictures and was still using them as her screensaver a year later when she told me

this story. She said every day with him was like a movie, where everything was

emotional and nothing was real.

I told her I felt the same way about Jeff. The night of our first date, which wasn't

really a date, I'd gone home and written about the shadow of a wine glass reflected on his

polo shirt, right where his heart was supposed to be.

Sara and I had previously only known each other in school and in bars, dizzy

nights on rooftops drinking vodka mixed with anything, but after we exchanged these

stories our friendship shifted. I told her I sensed this shift. I said, "I understand you

now."

Over the next year, we paralleled our obsessive loves for Michael and Jeff. We

called them our non-relationships. We deluded ourselves into thinking someday they

would both realize what they were missing. Still, we planned to break away. I said,

"You deserve better." She said, "He isn't good for you."

Then, another shift.

The night Sara and Jeff made their debut as a couple, I drank a bottle of wine and

someone led me somewhere to cry. I don't remember how long I was there before

Michael approached, before he put his arm around me and said, "Let's get out of here." I don't remember kissing him for the first time, only leaning in, only all that came after.

87 88

He held my hand. He called Jeff "that guy." He said, "I was never in love with Sara."

Now, looking back, I know I just wanted, for once, to be the one doing the hurting

instead of the one being hurt.

In bed I traced my fingers over his chest. He whispered into my hair, "I love you

so much" as he fell asleep. I thought, "I understand you now." In the morning, he was gone. STRANGERS

I was sixteen when my mother died, and at the time one thing was clear to me: any changes I made in my life after that point would be regrettable. I did not want to become a person different from who my mother knew. I would become that person - I knew I would. I spoke in my eulogy about going to college without my mother, about getting married without my mother, about having children without my mother. I assumed

I would do these things. I knew when I moved to D.C. from Florida, six years after her death, to go to graduate school without my mother, that I was changing. But this was just location, I told myself. Everything else could stay the same.

During the five-week hospitalization before her death, my younger sisters began taking kung fu classes. This was a new, different activity for them, so they were instructed to change out of their uniforms after class and before visiting her. A precaution, so our own mother would not be startled by two young girls she didn't know.

Strangers. Kung fu was my father's doing. He had mandated each of us become passionate about something - what I didn't realize at the time was an effort to distract us from her death. Passionate was his word. As I struggled to find a passion he approved of, I wondered how he could dictate such a thing - wasn't passion supposed to be revealed organically, naturally? Shouldn't it come from within? To his disappointment,

I never settled on a passion.

All this was years ago. Since then I've grown up. I have graduated high school.

I've gone to college and graduated that, too. I've moved a thousand miles away from my family, from where my mother died. My passions have taken me far away from my

89 90 mother, but though I've changed addresses I still refuse to become someone she wouldn't recognize. I now live in an apartment with thick walls, and the metaphor seems to imply

I've shut out the world. When I need to seek comfort, to connect with other people, I look out my window and make up stories about the people I see. I am full of contradictions: I make friends all the time, but so many I can't tell who the real ones are anymore. I have very low self-esteem, but love being the center of attention. I hate to be in crowds, but love to be surrounded by people. I live alone, but I get anxious when I'm away from my computer, where I can talk to everyone I've ever known in my entire life.

It's on my computer where I met John. We started talking four months after I moved to D.C. He lives out in the Maryland suburbs, a distance we've estimated to be about thirty minutes by car. We met online late one night when I was upset. I wasn't doing well in school. I was tense. I was lonely. I wasn't vulnerable, though. I was the one preying on him. He had no idea who I was, what I was capable of projecting on a man I didn't even know. Neither did I.

Eventually we started talking on the phone, and we've never stopped. Two years later we've still never met, and we probably never will.

Most of the time we talk dirty, until we both get off. Some of the time we just catch up, very very late at night. Often one or both of us has been drinking. He's dated other girls in the time we've been talking and I've gotten drunk and fooled around with other boys in the time we've been talking, but our friendship has remained consistent. 91

Now there's not much we don't know about each other. He never considers the potential

for a relationship, and I get to use him as an excuse for why things never got serious.

He doesn't know the real reason for why we've never met, though I can articulate it quite plainly, and if he ever asked I'd tell him: the expectations are too high and when he meets me he'll be disappointed that I'm not pretty enough, that I'm smarter than him, that he waited this long for me, and who I am isn't much. If we'd started things as a normal relationship, he would have dropped me long ago.

John doesn't think much about anyone other than himself. I don't get much attention from guys. The odds are stacked against us; he's not likely to give me the one thing I crave. So when everything aligns, when he calls me "sweetie" or remembers something I said months ago, or takes a moment to analyze my personality, I start to believe he might just be what I need. And the phone calls continue.

My neighbor Ruth is concerned I don't date enough. Ruth was the first person I met when I moved to D.C. As I was trying to figure out the complicated pair oflocks and accompanying keys for my frontdoor, she was making friends with my father at the elevator. Ruth has two dueling, but equally fierce personality traits you find out about as soon as you meet her: the overwhelming urge to know everyone, and the ability to just sit and be with herself. I often find that people with large social circles have those connections because of a fear of being alone, but Ruth has no such fear. She's been alone most of her eighty-two years. 92

She fascinated me at first. I'd walk the halls with her, or stop and chat with her at the garbage chute, anything to hear her story. She took the bus from Alabama to D.C.

when she was twenty-four - not much older than I was when I drove up here. I

sometimes wonder if she was born at the age of twenty-four; a new life, baptized by the waters of the Potomac, a wide-eyed young girl walking around the city with the hope that a change in geography would change her soul. She wouldn't say why she decided to move here; she'd only speak of vague notions of change. I'd say that was why I moved here too, though I don't know ifthat was correct. I wanted to develop my own sense of history, something I thought had been missing from my life. I wanted to come somewhere where people had stories I didn't know. I hadn't yet realized I would never really change, that even though my surroundings were different I'd still be the girl with the dead mother. I'd still have no examples of healthy relationships so I could forge my own.

Ruth seemed to have the same issues. "I went out with men, all the time. And I'd date a few for long periods of time." She paused to take a breath as she put her fragile hand against the wall and looked me in the eye. "I just found something wrong with each one of them."

I've been living here over two years now, and there have been a lot of comings and goings, but Ruth is still here. Recently she asked me ifl'd seen our new neighbor, the guy who just moved in between us. She told me he's young, cute too, and just broke up with his girlfriend. She raised her eyebrows suggestively, just once. I laughed in the 93 patronizing way I laugh at my aunt's bad jokes or at children who have tried to show me magic tricks. "Thanks for the tip, Ruth," I said, as I stepped into the elevator. "Have a nice day!"

The next day I noticed the mezuzah on the door and smiled. Friends joke with me for having a Jewish fetish, saying something about a Catholic girl being raised in South

Florida can't help but be intrigued by both cultural and religious Jews. There was something so exotic and comforting about those kids with their JCC, with their bat mitzvahs. Through my childhood eyes these kids were different, and therefore cultured.

My rosary and crucifix? These were not culture.

It's been weeks and I still haven't seen this neighbor, though I hear him through the bathroom walls or the crack under his door. The first Jewish name that pops into my head is Eli, and that's what I start calling him to myself.

John and I don't say each other's names. Ever. I always equate this avoidance to the movie Pretty Woman. Julia Roberts's character, a prostitute hired for the entire week by a wealthy businessman, in her first sexual encounter with said businessman, is asked what she does. "Everything," she replies. "But I don't kiss on the mouth." The theory is that while sex is all fun and games, something from which you can distance yourself, kissing on the mouth Means Something. This is, without acknowledging it, the way John and I treat each other's names. I drop his name all the time around my friends, but to say it to him is to venture into more meaningful territory than our relationship is allowed to trespass. 94

We clearly know each other's names, and in our playful IM introduction he asked my name and replied, "Hi Jenny" and I asked his name and replied, "Hi John." His full name is listed in my phone, because everyone's full name is. I wouldn't know his last name if he wasn't a radio newscaster, if he didn't message me with what he was about to say on the air before he said it, proof that the booming broadcast voice coming out of my stereo belonged to the same person who whispered in my ear through the phone.

Even though I know his name, I'm always jarred when he says it. Once I asked if he suffered from the same torture of a common name as I did, and he admitted he'd like to have a John Junior someday. I was shocked that he said his own name to me, and more shocked that it was spoken in such a personal revelation. Sometimes I'll be telling a story and will include quoted dialogue from a friend in which they say my name, and letting the word Jenny come out of my mouth in a conversation with him is like choking down some awful poison. My throat closes up.

One night, the only night we've ever carried on a full phone conversation to completion without talking dirty, he was drunk. I teased him about the possibility that he didn't know my name, and he pointed out it was in my email. "What's my name then?

Say my name," I teased.

"Jennapolitano," he slurred, a smile in his voice.

I laughed. "I'm sorry?"

"Jennapolitano!" He announced it with the enthusiasm of a child reciting the alphabet for the first time. "Jennapolitano!"

I don't think this counts. 95

In Pretty Woman, the kissing on the mouth storyline plays out in the course of the narrative, her breaking of this rule becoming proof to the audience and her friends that

Julia Roberts is falling for Richard Gere. In the back of my mind this is how I imagine avoiding each other's names will end with John. One night he'll call me spontaneously, instead of a pre-planned call through IM; I'll be out with friends and he'll say, "Jenny, are you busy?" Or it will be less innocent than that; without prodding on my part he'll be unable to hold in my name as he comes. And we'll be released from the awkward Jimbo we've placed ourselves in; we'll be free to explore feelings through words like adults.

Ruth is concerned that every time she sees me I'm running to or from work or class, or wearing sweats and cleaning my apartment. She's thought this since I moved in, and would speak with particular fondness of the formality of being courted by military men when she first left Alabama and was Jiving in a boarding house on K Street. A bus came down 16th to get them once a month. The girls would put on perfume, go down to the base in Quantico, and dance with Marines.

"I never see girls out front waiting for dates anymore," she said. "You all do your laundry on Saturday nights."

Her view of dating, though, is warped, and I tried to explain that it's not the same anymore. Which only gets her going again, because she thinks the rules of dating don't have enough restrictions anymore.

"I don't agree with a lot of the things girls do nowadays."

"Like what?" 96

"Oh, I don't even want to think about it. We just didn't do that kind of thing."

Ruth did eventually get married, to a man named Charles, when she was thirty­ s1x. She'd been dating in the city for twelve years before she finally found someone she wanted to stick to. "He was just so much fun," she said. She talked about how he would take her dancing, about how he had so much more energy than the men she was used to, how he treated her well and was kind and spent money on her. "And the whole time I thought he was just my age, maybe a little older." For the entire span of their six-month courtship, she never questioned his age and she never told him hers. As it turned out,

Charles had a much better grasp on the difference in their ages than she did.

Two days before the wedding, when they went to get the marriage license, she discovered he was sixty-eight years old.

The age difference does not shock me as much as it should. What always surprises me is Ruth's naivety. She was so unobservant that she didn't notice a thirty-two year age difference. Or perhaps she didn't want to notice, because noticing would mean denying herself the happiness Charles provided. And yet, I sometimes worry I'll make the choice of denial. That I'll settle, at the age of thirty-eight, and be widowed before my time.

A year after they were married, they were living near Dupont Circle, and Ruth wanted to move. There was a waiting list for one-bedroom apartments in our building, so she asked if two people could live in an efficiency. "They asked, 'Well, what kind of two people?' and I said a married two people. And they said, 'Yeah, that's fine."' For the 97

next twenty-four years, she and Charles lived in the same efficiency apartment, never

bothering to even put their names on the waiting list for a larger unit.

Then one day, he went to sleep, and he never woke up.

A week after Ruth first told me about Eli, I was dragging a kitchen garbage bag,

an empty pizza box, and a bag of recyclables to the trash room, when I stopped at my

front door. I heard Ruth's voice, and I was not in the mood for a conversation. My legs

were hairy, my tank top was too tight, my hair was greasy and lazily secured with a

bright yellow headband. So I flipped open my peephole, and waited for her to head back

into her apartment. Then I realized who she was speaking to.

"She lives right there, right on the other side of you. She's a writer, you know,

she's trying to be. Wants to write books. Real smart. About your age; what are you,

about twenty-five? Yep, she's twenty-five too. And she's a teacher, she teaches college, even though she's so young."

I couldn't hope to see either of them at that moment, since they were so far down the hallway, but that didn't stop me from angling myself in any attempts to get the peephole to work to my advantage.

Eli's name isn't actually Eli, but I was close; it's Evan. One day the signal on my wireless dropped, so I opened the networks window to see if I could find an open one.

This has happened several times in the last two years, so I have some familiarity with the weird titles my neighbors choose to keep for their networks: "Mavslider,'' "Festival of an

Epiphany,'' "Nancy." Since I can recite most of these, I was surprised to find a new 98 network with a new name, clearly first and last, with a very close signal. Suspecting that this might be Eli, I ran a search for it and came up with a graphic designer's website, resume, and portfolio. So when I heard him mention to Ruth that he'd gone to school in

Rochester, New York, I knew I'd begun putting together the pieces of the puzzle that would reveal who this person was.

Often when I'm feeling anxious I get in my car and drive without any direction or agenda. I may wind down the Rock Creek Parkway, cross the Memorial Bridge and circle back home. Another favorite route is the Inner Loop of the Beltway, just five or six exits I say, then just another more, and another more, until I've hit Virginia. But more often than not I find myself driving up Connecticut A venue as far as it will go. I leave D.C. through a traffic circle, slow to thirty where police cameras have taken my picture and sent me speeding tickets. I pass under the Beltway, and up farther the road tricks me into making a left, though the street name stays the same. I reach Georgia

A venue, which has come a long way parallel to intersect with Connecticut. And then I drive - back and forth, up and down, across and across this intersection.

This is where John lives.

He's told me, of course, that he lives near this intersection. On nights as we tried to determine how long it would take me to reach him if I got in my car right now, if snow wasn't accumulating by a magnitude, if we thought we could wait that long, if my apartment wasn't a mess, if he didn't have his roommate passed out on their couch, if I didn't have to be at work in six hours. Every time, a joke. What if, what if. I'll never 99

reach him, of course. We know this. We know why. I know I'm not comfortable

knowing him, letting him know me. I know on any given day my eyebrows aren't

plucked or my nails aren't painted, I've taken on too much water weight that week or I

have an unbearable new crop of acne. When I get my next haircut, when I lose thirty

pounds - I tell myself this is when we'll meet. I laugh when I think he could be hiding

anything from me, though - I consider him transparent. I consider him dumb.

He's wise not to get involved with someone who thinks this lowly of him.

I've always obsessed in this way, and often it strikes me that my mother never knew the kind of obsession I was capable of, the same as I never knew what kind of person she was. There are things I want to ask her now, things I can't ask anyone else about her because they are too personal. When was her first relationship? How many

men did she sleep with in her life? Had she ever been betrayed? Had she ever had her heart broken? What was her worst decision? I used to say I had no regrets, but I wonder if everyone hides behind that philosophy for a time but abandons it once they reach a certain age. When did she realize she had to stop hiding behind that shield?

This is the only question I remember asking her:

I was fourteen and my parents had been living in separate houses for one year, their official divorce only weeks old. She told me once that my father had cheated on her first, but the straw that broke the camel's back was her affair with Louis, the man who had been his closest friend. Lou wasn't a lifelong friend or anyone worth keeping 100

around, or even anyone I remember anything about except the fist fight he had with my

dad in our driveway that year.

I don't remember him because immediately after the divorce was final, while the

congratulatory roses he'd sent were still wilting on our dining room table, my mom

started seeing Rodger, a city police officer assigned to the middle school where she

worked as the front office receptionist. She told me she'd started seeing him while

driving me home from school one day, taking the long route because I had bad cramps

and the movement of the car always helped soothe them. My feet were propped up on the dashboard, my socks forming smudges on the wide minivan windshield.

It was then that I chose to ask the blunt question. "Why do all your relationships overlap?" My heart skipped a beat, knowing I was being disrespectful, and worse, hurtful.

She apparently decided it was safe to declare, "Don't quit your job 'til you've found a new one."

There must have been a long pause then, or I must have scoffed, or cried, or told her that statement made her sound less like a mother and more like a person with questionable morals, because I know it was the same car ride when she said, "You'll understand when you're older, when you know what it's like to really like someone."

I hadn't yet told her about Chris, a boy who, in retrospect, was completely attainable, but who I simply couldn't piece together my feelings for.

"I do like someone."

"No, I mean a real person." 101

"He is a real person."

"No, I mean like a real person who you know." She paused, presumably to be careful how she presented this next thought. "Not someone from TV or a movie."

Chris would be the only real-live boy I'd ever tell my mother about, and the only object of affection she'd ever meet, and even when she encouraged me to just tell him how I felt, and even when she slipped into a coma while I was at his birthday party, and even when she died and I started liking someone else and went back to liking Chris and then started liking someone else again, and even when Chris and I went to the same college, I still couldn't quite piece together how I felt about him.

There are so many potential complications in my potential relationship with Eli, merely in that I don't know what he's seen and heard. Has he caught a glimpse of me in too-small cotton shorts, thighs jiggling, maneuvering a laundry basket full of dirty underwear downstairs? Our walls are thick, but perhaps he's heard me talking to John late at night on the phone, in that voice that's not my own, that smiley flirtatious giggle, that raspy voice that teases, "Yeah, you know you like that." Did he step out into the hall to pick up the paper the last time a man slinked out my door, wrinkled and pillow faced, while I drowned under the covers in a pool of new sunlight, pretending to still be asleep?

Does he know none of that is what it seems? That these are the inevitable byproducts of alcohol and friendship?

Part of me likes it. I can ascribe this persona to myself as seen through his eyes: the slut who's too busy to notice you. I'm that popular girl in high school, who snuck off 102

to the gazebo behind the science building and wouldn't give him the time of day. I'm

easy, yet unattainable, and that makes me desirable.

John is the closest I've come to any kind ofrelationship, and as much as I force

against this idea, in the end I know I have to live my life independent of my mother.

Because I have changed. John and Eli - I never touch them. But I've changed, and found the kind of passion that sustains a lifetime. My desire to find the kind of intimacy my sixteen-year-old self never experienced is palpable, and it has led to me forging connections with men who will never know me better than my mother did.

One night, while on the phone with John, I had an anxiety attack. I froze; I couldn't feel my nerves anywhere I touched. I reached between my legs, panicked, feeling only dulled sensation, as he continued to describe the way he'd slowly undress me if we were together. He wanted me pinned against a wall; I wanted to cry, to say, "I know this isn't the time but I've known you for two years and I need you to say shh, to tell me everything is going to be all right." I couldn't say that to him. I hung up the phone.

It's not uncommon that we'll get disconnected, or that I'll get cranky and hang up the phone and fall asleep and pretend we got disconnected. But in the silence following the hang up and in the two times he rang to voicemail in the next few minutes, I was lonely. I called him back.

"Hey there." He was unphased.

"I'm sorry." 103

"Your leg is still wrapped around me? And my hand is on your thigh."

"Sure."

"It's starting to inch its way higher."

I paused. Realizing he was waiting for me to respond, I squeaked out "Mhmm."

"You still into this?"

"Sure."

A moment went by and I used it to steady my breath. I wondered what his face looked like as he pondered what to say next. If he just blinked once or twice, if he was rolling his eyes, if he was leaning his head back trying to suppress a sigh. "You sure?" he asked.

"Yes."

"My hand is starting to inch its way higher."

"Mhmm."

"Pulling you in closer to me, higher and higher."

''Mhmm.''

"Reaching under your skirt, higher and higher. Higher and higher. Slowly. Still going."

In the dark, that late, my gasps for air must have sounded like soft cries of pleasure, but I was listening to his voice to keep me calm; what he was saying didn't matter. I was just reaching for connection as much as I could stand, for someone to try to read my silences. THE ANSWER IS NOWHERE

The only place selling cigarettes between the party and my house is the Exxon station, so we buy some and sit at the curb smoking and talking for a half an hour. I want to ask when you switched brands. But I don't.

I am sobering up, but you are not, and I'm afraid people walking by will think you are high because of the way you're talking.

"Everyone wants to be somewhere other than where they are. Where do you want to be right now? Where would you rather be than outside the gas station dumpster with me smoking cigarettes at 2:00 in the morning?"

I am tempted to chain smoke for the first time in my life, about to pull another

Parliament from your pack and light it against mine before the fire hits my fingers.

But I don't.

It's more satisfying in the moment to press this one against the pavement and push each burning ember on top of the other, kindling the fire then crushing the entire stub into the ground, wiping everything away.

104