rach-out-loud

[rach-out-loud]

amber

The door to the trap is open. It’s always been open.

This is what it feels like: the pinch and press of it, the sharp snap of teeth over a limb. Mousetraps, bottle traps, box traps, bodygrips. A Saw trap, riddles and keys and blood, panic, mental anguish. Tear yourself apart to live; what is a pound of flesh, what are fingernails, what is another bruise, another scratch, another bruise, another bruise, another –

This is what it feels like: a disappearing act, carnival smoke in your hair, rugburn on your hands and knees from hiding in back panels, beneath trap doors. Being sent into the ether in a puff of pink smoke is nothing; magicians make their assistants vanish all the time. Why bother with the reflection in the funhouse mirror if you can’t recognize yourself?

This is what it feels like: a wave crashing against a rock, an insect caught in amber. Erosion, acceptance. You can get used to anything after enough time. She has been in the trap since she was nineteen. The trap can be gentle. The trap can be kind – look how it cradles her boys, how it strokes her hair. Look at the flowers it left blooming in the vase in the kitchen. Look how it cries when she makes herself sick, how it sits across from her in the visitor’s lounge, how carefully it slots the puzzle pieces together on the plastic table.

The door to the trap is open. The door to the trap has always been open.

Her life is the trap. Where else will she go?

[rach-out-loud]

you said you wanted a love letter (but i don't think you meant this)

    It was well beyond last call while Marie squealed, drunk and excited, at another girl about boy bands in the half-dark of the bar; the only lights left were the ones from outside, halogen white shining in through the plate window and turning the pair screeching at each other about the Backstreet Boys into a missing Escher print, a lost frame from an Arbus contact sheet. You and I were by the door, tired and waiting, your head tipped back below the unlit Molson Canadian sign, and without any warning you reached out and tucked me under your arm, held me there.

                                                                                                Somewhere in the space between the end of Henry and the beginning of now, I’d somehow lost this: easy familiarity, casual flirtation. Being comfortable. You radiated warmth and I turned into it, tried to breathe, suddenly ticking through all the small kindnesses I didn’t even know I was collecting – stupid texts and terrible shots, nicknames and dumb jokes and everything layering one on top of the other like the sediment in rock, fortified enamel.

  “Hey, goose,” you said, simple as anything, and I closed my eyes.

  …

  You’ve got to know that I learned early to swallow up my secrets: if others didn’t know, it couldn’t be taken, couldn’t be turned against me. It was easier to keep the truth close to my chest, or else lock it in irons, box it up in a safe – better still if I lost the combination, after, tossed it in the ocean for good measure.

  It’s sad, but it’s true; everyone else lit up like signal flares, sent their firework hearts across the sky, while I drifted through their waters in my leaking raft and narrowly avoided the rocky shore, the undertow. These waters were for living men, and I was terrified of drowning somewhere in the dark.

  I don't know why I'm telling you this, except that for a long time, it was easier to drift alone.

  …

  Ben laughed and said I’ve got it wrong, that Laura is the one you’re fooling around with, that Laura is the one waiting up for you when her boy is off at drill, and have I seen the two of you? Chemistry central, right there. I smiled, sick on the inside, and when Ben glanced up at the hockey highlights on the television I asked him, what, you don’t think I have a shot?

  “Not really,” Ben admitted, reaching blindly for his beer, “You’re just – you’re you,” and sparks crackled in my fingertips as I balled my hands under the counter, fumbled for my phone.

  Ben is as fluent in geek as he is Italian, he waxes poetic about archaeological digs and Doctor Who and sees me as a sister, sees me as extra flesh and a smart mouth, jokes and advice and not a challenge, not competition. He said that Laura is the one you’re after and I wanted to push my phone into the side of his face, wanted to tell him, Look at what he’s said to me, the dozens of little green word bubbles, all of them I want to get you drunk and I’m sorry I bit you and you should be banging something way more fun than your head and

  and

  I put my phone away.

  …

  I’d known Henry ten years and he’d asked me to marry him, once, the two of us alone in the orange streetlamp glow outside the pool hall on the Boulevard; we’d had a decade of shared space and inside jokes and blurred lines between us, but at the end, I couldn’t reach him – in the end, he didn’t care. I’d loved him more than anyone and that last time, hunched against the wall outside my father’s hospital room, anxious and angry and wrapped in scarves, a coat too light for the weather – that last time, the phone held tight between sweaty, shaking hands, begging and pleading I need you, I need you, I know we’re not talking but please, please, call me back –

            With you, I never had to ask.

  …

  Coming back wasn’t quite coming home and Marie always warned me not to go out by myself, warned me not to be around you alone, but I’d been itching in my own skin since I stepped off the plane from Tel Aviv, split open like a melon rotting in my mother’s kitchen. Everything felt off kilter, like I was continually missing the dropped step in a stairwell: moving was a chore, talking torture, even breathing was too much weight to bear. I’d wrapped myself up in heavy jackets and sat on the porch at night; I’d been sick and miserable in the desert but on the stone steps, snow melting into the hems of my pajamas, more than anything I wanted to be back across the ocean, more than anything I wanted to see you.

  The place was crowded – busier than usual, even for a Friday, and if I had to pick a moment I think it would be this: that half-second before you looked up and saw me, walking through the sea of people parting unintentionally around me like some lovestruck Moses, the tension in your arms as you leaned over the counter, distraction melting into recognition, revelation, affection.

  This is the moment I would want to keep, trap it in a locket and wear it around my neck: the two of us on opposite sides of the bar, two sets of arms folded on the polished countertop and touching only through coats and long sleeves, the brushing of hands around an offered glass. Feeling like I was finally settling back into myself, far away from that fitful, half-awake delirium of an in-flight dream, from that dark shoreline in Bat Yam where I stood with my feet in the Mediterranean and my heart somewhere else entirely. Feeling like I was home.

  …

  The only place I don’t think about you is in bed.

  I feel like that’s about as fair as I can be.

  …

  Marie looked me in the eyes that first night and when she said I want him all I heard was welcome to the arena. I was somewhere between ready and not, no sword save for the words up my sleeve, the shield around my battered heart so dented it was useless. Marie had her weapons but I’d cut off my armor; somehow I managed to keep my footing, remembered how to parry and block, a veteran of heartbreak thrown into battle until Marie finally slunk off in defeat, stumbled down to the end of the counter to lick her wounds, to wait for last call.

  I was left blinking against the sudden glow of you, unused to attention and blindsided by interest and a wide smile, a kiss on the cheek. The tequila set the whole world shining and hope was blooming somewhere in my chest, roses bursting through the gaps in my ribs; Marie tugged on my collar as I pulled on my coat and I tossed a grin like a paper airplane over my shoulder as we left, all the while thinking, maybe, maybe, maybe.

  I was drunk and dizzy when we pushed through to the parking lot, spinning so that the whole empty plaza was a carnival ride of color and light – a rollercoaster run off the tracks, a tilt-a-whirl gone horribly awry. You are ruining my life! Marie shrieked, and I was so far gone that I couldn’t tell anymore if she was being serious or not, so far gone that I couldn’t do anything but laugh and spin, laugh and fall, laugh and lay there, stretched out on the dirty asphalt and stare up blindly at the washed-out pinpricks of stars spiraling out above me.

  …

  This is the way it happened: you went to the jewelry store on your lunch break, stealing away in the middle of the day to the mall down the road, circling through well-lit cases until a clerk approached and offered suggestions, helped you choose. Monday, Monday, my last day was Monday – you carried it in the glove box of your car for a week.

  This is the way it happened: Anna looked over your shoulder as you clicked through an online catalogue, trying to find something that would fit me, that would put a smile on my face. She knows bits and pieces but not the whole story; she knows you’ll miss me, my Friday stops and our stupid banter, horror movies traded like baseball cards – I can picture her standing in the middle of your living room, picking up discarded DVD cases and giving you a look, the corners of her mouth twitching as she asks, More porn from your girlfriend? She trusts you. She loves you.

  Anna and I have never met but I’d like to think that we could have been friendly if we had, that she would be the one to tell you that silver was a better choice, that hearts are too ostentatious, that she would be the one to tap the laptop screen and tell you, “That one. That one would work.”

  This is what it means: grace, power, change. It means that someone out there cares about me – that they want me to be happy, that I matter. It means that I wear it with pride, with courage, with love.

[rach-out-loud]

mellie

Mellie used to say don't put all your eggs in baskets, which made no sense 'cause her baskets were always full of needles and yarn and blackberries, that one time out on the Cape. Mellie didn't have a mother, just a daughter in Boise and a sister in Indiana who I spoke to on the phone once, her tinny voice whirring through the wires like something distant, imaginary. She might as well have been living on a cloud, maybe under the sea, even, for all we saw of her. Mellie didn't like men or tight spaces, cliffside roadstops or fences or blood. She hid in the kitchen the one time my father picked me up – I could see her through the window, her face shaded, turned down. She always let me lick the spoon. Mellie slept on the porch one winter. She said it was because she needed the air.

[rach-out-loud]

On the Art of Returning

Hark! What monstrous beast, what wailing newborn, What fresh new hell approaches in my line? Is there something there, curtains lightly worn, Perhaps an old coffeepot wrapped in twine? Have you your card, good ma’am, or your receipt? Anything I could use to lend you aid? There’s no need to shout, ma’am, nor use deceit, It is not for this shit that I get paid. Do you not realize I am human, too, Not some peon meant to simper and bag? Is that too difficult for you – Beyond your limited nature, you hag? Quitting this job will be scratching an itch: I’ll tell you how I feel, you giant bitch.

[rach-out-loud]

long roll downwards

“We should spend more of our lives on staircases.”

– Georges Perec

    Hannah is already a little drunk by the time she gets to the Eagle’s Nest, navigating carefully along the sparsely-lit streets as she stumbles from Nina’s parents’ house to the bar. It’s a local dive, neighborhood-friendly, tucked away on the inside of a plaza dominated by a grocery store, a florist, and a terrible Chinese restaurant; Nina likes to go there on hockey nights. Hannah is mostly indifferent to it, tagging along with friends who want to stop in on the weekends, but this is the first time she has ever gone by herself; a fact made worse by the unfortunate truth that it’s the closest – the only – place she can think of going without putting herself behind the wheel of a car. It’s almost three in the morning by the time Hannah reaches it, having tripped somehow on a cracked patch of sidewalk and lost her boot halfway, but there’s still a few people lingering outside: an older couple arguing quietly in the shadow of the plaza awning, a handful of college kids smoking and talking around the wire table in front of the big picture window. She doesn’t recognize any of them.

There’s a pause as the song on the jukebox changes and when Dean finally looks up, the way he smiles when he sees her makes her stomach drop, like missing a step in the stairwell. She hasn’t known him for very long and is the first to admit she doesn’t know him very well, but Hannah can’t help but like him – he’s funny, he’s friendly, he gives her free drinks. He flirts with her sometimes when she comes in with her friends and even though she likes it, there’s a decent enough chance that he already has a girlfriend. The Facebook results were inconclusive.

“Didn’t think you were coming in tonight,” he says, wiping his hands dry with a dishrag. The music is too loud in the almost-empty bar, he nearly has to shout. “It’s been a while, Han. You too busy to come see me?”

Hannah shrugs. “Sort of.”

“Well, you made it in time for last call, sweetheart. Anything you want?”

“Tequila,” she says, “A lot of it.”

Dean obliges and Hannah leans on her forearms against the counter, thinks about laying her head down while she waits. He sets the glass at her wrist and Hannah picks it up without preamble; she swallows it all and the Cuervo rings in her mouth, numbs it and warms it at the same time.

“Bad day?” he asks, and when she doesn’t answer he gives her a look, half-thoughtful, half-worried. The way he’s standing makes it look like the wings on the eagle etched into the mirror are growing out of his back and she almost laughs – Some guardian angel, she thinks, and when he asks, “Wanna talk about it?” Hannah can only shake her head. She breathes deep and it shudders in her chest, her throat. She can’t get her words to work, not yet.

“Wait here,” Dean says, and pours little more in her glass before he disappears off to the side. The lights in the window flick off and the bar gets darker, warmer, as Dean starts shuffling people outside. Security goes out for a smoke as the college kids trickle in slowly to pay their tabs, find their coats, and Hannah stays quiet down at her end of the counter, trying to make herself small and unnoticeable. She stares down at the glass in her hand and feels like some old-lady drunk, like that crazy lady she saw in the deli last week who put lithium tablets in her ice cream like sprinkles, and it sends an electric shiver all the way down her spine because that’s the big fear, isn’t it? That she’ll end up just like that, homeless-woman overcoat and all, that she’s spent all this time climbing, struggling against the incline and pulling herself out of the pit, just to wind up as someone who can’t face it, can’t face anything, that after everything that’s happened she’s still just a girl who can’t, who can’t –

Hannah drowns her thoughts in what’s left in her glass. She had a lot of rum back at Nina’s place and the tequila probably isn’t doing her any favors.

Dean turns the locks on the door once the cash is in the drawer and turns off the TV over the bar. It makes the room smaller, it feels like a cave. The jukebox is still playing on the money someone else put in, some super-happy synth-pop song she doesn’t know, and it’s jarring, almost, the dissonance between the upbeat music in the room and the hard emptiness in the pit of her stomach, her reasons for being there. She’s still staring at her empty glass when Dean turns her chair around, spinning the seat so she’s facing him. He’s so much taller than her, a monstrous shape in the low light. His hands are warm where he rests them on her shoulders and Dean runs them down her arms, his hands huge over hers as he pulls her to her feet. She’s expecting the hug but it still feels strange: being this close to someone she barely knows, held like she matters by someone who has no real reason to care. Dean holds her tight and Hannah turns her head so that the side of her face rests against his chest, breathing in as she closes her eyes.

“What happened?” he asks, and Hannah swallows hard.

She wants to tell him about how she came home from running errands yesterday and broke down almost as soon as she came through the front door, how she couldn’t even make it up the staircase before she’d collapsed, boneless and sobbing, on the fourth step, unable to stop or move or make any sense of it at all. She wants to tell him about how isolated she feels, how she knows her friends and family are all happy she’s come back, that she’s home, but that doesn’t change the fact that the lives of everyone she loves have orbits that don’t revolve around her, now, that she’s freewheeling like comet over vast and vacant sky. She feels useless, empty, like she fell out of her own body somewhere along the line; food doesn’t even taste like food anymore, just something she has to put in her mouth and swallow. Dean smoothes his hand over the back of her head and Hannah wants to tell him about how nearly every day since she’s come back home has felt like an uphill battle, like she’s been climbing and climbing endless flights of stairs and there’s still no sight of the top floor.

“Just a rough day,” she says instead, and she can feel Dean’s mouth pressing against the top of her head. He tells her that he’s sorry and she shifts in his arms, wishing for an exit sign.

[rach-out-loud]

fresh fruit

If you would believe it, there was a time where pineapples were so expensive, that families would rent them in their prime and put them on display, like a new hat or a fancy sculpture. Thirteen, fourteen families would pass the fruit around long before anyone took a bite – between you and me, I think that’s a little wrong. But pineapples have long been signs of love and hospitality, self-confidence, success; it seemed like a sign from above (a blessing, or some kind of assurance) your head was shaped a little bit like one: like I was on the right path, my wait done.

[rach-out-loud]

falling in, falling out

(the pros and cons of being without you)

      in

    There’s a part of me that feels like I’m suffering from the emotional equivalent of minor brain damage: I’m dizzy, I can’t concentrate, I’m getting dehydrated. I’m relearning how to do all sorts of small things over again that I’d never thought twice about before – making phone calls, dining at restaurants, going to the movies alone – but I can still add and subtract and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, I’m managing to tie my shoes just fine. 

I met your mother in the grocery store and even if her words were polite and pleasant I still felt like I was chewing on glass throughout the whole conversation, walking in bare feet over nine yards of glowing coals without any end in sight. I was like her daughter, she told me once, the hidden favorite, the lost child she raised in the basement; I could always turn to her for help if I needed it. So much for that. 

Austin was supposed to be cowboy boots and whiskey, horror movies and indie bookstores and a tiny apartment in the middle of the city, close to a new favorite restaurant, the library, my school. Austin was supposed to be a fresh start and trips to the Gulf, driving backcountry roads under an enormous starlit sky. I shouldn’t miss what never was, but there you are. 

Last night there was a Deadly Women marathon on one channel and three Jean-Claude Van Damme movies in a row on another and I hate that I made it six digits into your phone number before I even realized what I was doing. 

I know that love is not an accountant’s ledger of favors and promises, but it’s hard to not look back and tally up our profits, sort through the files and split our history between the neatness of numbers, even columns adding up to zero. I put more in than I ever received and it’s hard not to be bitter, pushing through the paperwork to find this was just a Ponzi scheme, a two-bit scam run by an experienced crook. Like a fool I signed over my life’s savings without reading the fine print, ignored the suspicious feeling in my gut and let myself be blinded by a white-toothed smile, the promise of a solid future. It is hard, knowing the truth: that this was all a long con, that I am just another mark, crying over an emptied account.

      out

    I don’t have to pretend to like modern art anymore – you might think a fifteen-minute video of a man staring at a camera, covered in bees, is “a visionary approach to the genre,” but I certainly don’t. The same for plain white canvases the size of houses, spider-prints on woodblocks, the poor man’s Andy Warhol etching dented soup cans with Orwell quotes and nautical stars. Have fun trolling through endless rooms of ridiculous industrial light installations without me – I’ll be at the bar. 

There is a moment where my aunt asks me how you are doing and it feels nice, not having to lie and say that you are thinking of going back to school, that you are working on a novel, that you are looking to leave your dead-end job and find another with better pay, reasonable hours. It feels good not having to make excuses. 

Our mutual friends like me better. It’s petty, but it’s true. 

If I want to go to bars alone and kiss attractive strangers without guilt, I can. If I want to spend my evening hours writing and doing laundry instead of sleeping, I can. If I want to ugly cry while watching The Goodbye Girl after a long day at work, I can. If I want to play Jefferson Starship’s “We Built This City” on a continuous two-hour loop, you can roll your eyes and fake-strangle yourself all you want but I will never have to justify my inexplicable love of this terrible song – my love of anything – to you again. 

My love is not afraid of fire, your sad rustic rabble gathering in the town square. My love snaps and sparks like a livewire, my love is a hissing, screaming monster rising from a laboratory slab and one day I will find someone who will appreciate the black-and-white beehive of my hair, my fragile, electrified heart. I will find someone with a square jaw, maybe, bolts screwed into his neck, a limited vocabulary, I will find someone who will love me in all my fanged glory, whose scars of creation will rightly match mine. My love will burn villages, peasant. You’d best find a priest, or a pitchfork.

[rach-out-loud]

ten honest thoughts

  1.

The first thing I ever shoplift is lipstick. I do not know how old I am, only that I am old enough to walk to the Rite Aid at the corner unattended, flanked on either side of the wide blacktop shoulder by Alicia and Jeila – fifth grade, I think. Fourth at the earliest. Alicia is tall and athletic and Jeila is red-haired and skinny; both of my hands could completely circle her waist if she let me, and I feel like a small hippopotamus walking between them, two sets of hands on my coat collar like fingers wrapped around the hook of a lead. Alicia likes to steal and Jeila likes to egg her on and I am caught in the middle, torn between wanting to be good and wanting to join in, and Jeila watches the register while Alicia nudges me closer to the rack, looming high up before me like a wall ready to be scaled.

  I take the one closest to me: deep red, dark red. Revlon, I think. $9.95 in a gold and black tube.

  We go home. We do not get caught, not that day. My mother drives me to my grandmother’s afterward, and I play with the lipstick in the pocket of my coat the whole drive over, sequester myself away in the downstairs bathroom once I’m left alone. I’ve never put on makeup before: it’s been warmed by my pocket and smears across my face like thick, waxy paint, sticks to my teeth like bloody meat. Women in the movies have red lips, perfect hair, they have hearts that turn either black or bleeding depending on the music swell and this is the first moment where I see myself reflected in them: there, in the tiny, wood-paneled bathroom with the oil portrait of my aunt on the wall, I can see myself years ahead in a desert, in a laboratory, in a film noir bar with my hair loose and legs for days, smoky eyes and lips like spades split in half while I tell some gun-toting scoundrel where he could find the diamonds, the kidnapped ambassador’s daughter. I am not a girl, here, but a woman: a woman with weight, a woman with power.

  I stare in the mirror for hours imagining an impossible future, fraught with danger, intrigue, romance. My grandmother finds me there and sighs, her whole body sagging with the weight of unshed disappointment as she breaks the spell the mirror has set over me, sets to cleaning the whole mess off; she swipes dry tissues over my mouth and my face is pink from nose to chin, the nails of her free hand dig into my jaw as she turns my head this way and that, looking for traces she might have missed. My throat is dry. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.

  “I wanted –” I start, unsure of how to finish, “I wanted to look like –”

  My grandmother shakes her head. “Oh, honey, don’t,” she says, “Men don’t want girls who look like this.”

    2.

Stories were home to me long before my own was. I have been told to look for the feeling of it in people, in places, but books do not brook such disappointment so easily found in earth and flesh; if one ends badly, it can be retold, reshelved, given away. Broken hearts cannot be placated so easily.

    3.

My grandmother may love me, but she does not particularly like me: there is too much of my father in me – rust, iron, ink – and not enough of my mother, she of the short hair and doglike devotion, my mother with her curved spine riddled with holes. She takes food from my plate and curses my father’s family and thinks I’d make some nice Jewish doctor a wonderful bride should I ever rid myself of my bitter tongue, my petulant attitude. I have the hair for it, she says, a good voice, decent hips – once I lose the weight, I’d be a real catch. She’d like to see a great-grandchild before she dies, and I’m not getting any younger.

  She married my grandfather to get out of her house; an abusive father, a quietly strong mother, a sister and brother with better fortunes than hers. My mother did the same. Sometimes I think I can see myself in her – the tilt of my nose, the set of my eyes – but when I blink, it is gone.

    4.

We were on the dock at the house her family was renting and it was late, the sky already full of stars. Her family was in the living room and we navigated the cold wooden planks with the light from our phones until we could sit comfortably in the black, knee to knee, laughing at our own clumsiness. The lake was wide and dark before us, reflecting the night like a mirror, a parallel world. She did not know the constellations, but I did: Cygnus, Cassiopeia, Libra and Draco and all the other summer configurations, balls of light dead for millennia, strung up over our heads like tealights as I told her all the stories I could remember. Dead men tell no tales, but survivors take up pens, survivors always learn by heart. Water lapped up against the dock as she looped her arm through mine and pulled me back, laid us both flat so that we could stare upwards at the sky and find Hercules, Scorpius, the Pleiades.

                                              One word to describe each other: to her, eccentric. In return, important.

  When I think of her, this is what comes first.

    5.

The first is small: whispers and comments, being snubbed at lunch. The second is a bit longer: no seats on the bus, no partners for gym, for music, for anything fun. With the third comes the snip of scissors as Graham Hagen slices off the end of a ponytail – the teacher catches him, luckily, before he can do more damage, but dark hair still spills across the plastic table like cut straw and it sticks to your hands when you hold it up later, examining it the way you would an interesting insect, an owl pellet. Your hair hangs at a weird angle in the back for a month.

  This is how it starts: soon it will be snowballs and pop cans from car windows, soon it will be stolen private notebooks read to the entire class. Soon it will be theft and rumors and parent-teacher conferences, lunches eaten alone in the library for lack of anywhere else to go. This is where you devour books and memorize poems, this is where you pick up your first pen and draw lyrics and lines over your arms, your feet, try to press so hard that the ink bleeds past the skin. This is where you fake sick on the bad days, curl into yourself in the privacy of home and eat frosting from the can, watch Saturday Night Live reruns with your head buried into the couch pillows and imagine yourself somewhere shiny and new.

  This is how you learn: don’t let the hurt show. No tears, no pain. Laugh. Laugh.

    6.

The first time I heard Sekou Sundiata it was like my brain caught fire. The first time I read Sandra Cisneros it was like my heart was beating inside someone else’s chest. Fitch left me speechless and Pavlova cracked open my ribcage, Rilke held my lungs in his god-fearing hands and squeezed.

  I want more than anything for someone to feel that way about me.

    7.

His name was John or Jim or Josh and he had been drinking since he’d gotten off the plane three days earlier, but there was a moment at my cousin’s wedding where I looked at his business partner and thought, in the same breath, you’re an asshole and I want you to touch me.

  This was not the first time this particular stroke of inspiration crossed my mind, scrolling shamefully across the bottom of my thoughts like the rolling ticker in a news feed.

  It has definitely not been the last.

    8.

My grandfather was an artist, an accountant, the only one in his family to have green eyes. He was the only grandfather I had the chance to know. I was not allowed to attend his funeral and now, thirteen years later, I keep thinking of the ways we venerate the dead – eternal flames and iron-gated graveyards, monuments and military bands and weeks of mourning, draped in black – and of how my grandfather passed away in May and by February my grandmother was married again, selling off his paintings and his jackets and giving his watches to my cousins, his ties to my uncles. There was nothing for me but photographs, and even those were meant for others; too precious for my greedy hands, my thirsty, grieving heart.

  My grandmother is going through photographs again – none of the cut ones, none with my mother’s first family headless in dinner jackets or long-forgotten cousins with their arms around empty air on park benches – and lays them out across her plain white dining room, piling them up in frames on tables and chairs, leaning them against the wall like carnival prizes: throw a ball, win your history! How strange it is to see my grandfather’s face amongst the lot, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, trapped in creased black-and-white paper behind a crumbling cardstock frame. Nineteen years old and handsome, he was likely the one who set the timer, who squished himself into the view of an unknown rabbi’s office. There are a dozen men posing in this photograph and every single one of them is dead, now.

  My grandmother catches me looking and tears that one from my hands – “That’s mine,” she says, “It’s not supposed to be out with the rest,” and she places it carefully in the crook of her arm before sauntering off into the living room. My mother continues sorting through photos and I can only stand there, speechless, thinking of how empty my grandfather’s plot had been when I’d gone to the cemetery last year: unkempt, unvisited, the grass untouched, greener than green.

  “Kiddo, he doesn’t care,” my father reminds me later, unpacking groceries and pretending that he can’t see me hiding tears behind my hair. My father wants to be cremated, his ashes shot into space, he has no use for the family politics of graveyards. But still: the moment my grandmother tore the picture from my grip I could feel my grandfather’s hands on my feet, the rumble of his voice in his chest, the forgotten needle in the carpet sticking into my leg. I could feel how cold the ground was as I knelt on all fours, crying and mumbling, scraping away with my fingers at the earth that had grown, muddy and thick, over the headstone.

    9.

At one point, everything I knew about sex came from books.

    10.

I dreamed of you exactly once:

  I met you in a bar in Washington and it was me, but not – taller but still small, slimmer but still soft, the version of myself I would like to see in a movie. You had your hand curled around a whiskey rocks and I wore a green blazer, pinned my hair back. Your collar was neat and pressed.

  The low light made your hair seem redder, gave your nose a sharper hook. Your eyes met mine and you waved me over, the bar was loud and the booth small enough that we had to sit closer than what might have been proper just to hear each other. You kept drawing shapes with your fingers in the wet rings left by our glasses – they covered the table by last call, testimonials to a successful reconnection. I did not know where the time went, only that by the end I was bold enough to ask whether you remembered that time you called me “beautiful” and drunk enough to ask you if you meant it. I have been funny and sweet and kind, but not cute, not pretty, certainly never beautiful. My heart did not race as you licked your lips, moved closer. The air was thick between us: stale and sweet, like old liquor spilled somewhere behind the bar, and your hand found my knee under the table as you said, “I did,” your fingers moved in circles as you said, “Still do.”

  The turbulence broke the fantasy; thunderbolts striking like a bull’s-eye to the heart, rattling the jet and ripping me back into the world. When I left, we were in your kitchen: my back to the sink, your hands in my hair.

[rach-out-loud]

Exit Strategies for the Perpetually Lost and Lonely:

Move to Boston. Date a Patriots fan and work in a Chilean restaurant. Don’t be offended when the wait staff speaks to you in Spanish; they’re teasing, and don’t know you wasted four years of high school doodling in your French notebook. Pretend you’re a med student and wander the Harvard campus, find anatomy books left behind on study tables and try to find the place for pain, the impossible cracks that hurt can fill. Your Pats fan will break up with you when they lose to the Bills, and you will laugh and toast to him as he storms out, the dumb fuck.

Move to San Francisco. Become a flight attendant and live in the Tenderloin. Have a boyfriend who writes freelance and buys cheap wine on Thursdays from your neighbor, who gets it off a truck from a friend of a friend near a vineyard. Your calves will look great, but the steep constant walk won’t get rid of that muffin top, or the loneliness. When your boyfriend leaves you for a drag queen, throw his laptop off the roof and relish in the sound it makes when it finally hits the ground.

Move to Miami. Swim with dolphins and make fun of the tourists and flirt openly with the waiters in the Greek restaurant you go to with your grandmother every Monday afternoon. She will want you to take diet pills, the hag, and you will lie face-down on the shag carpet afterwards with a mimosa hangover, tongue sticking to your teeth and wishing for death to just come and claim you, already. Get up and shower. Go to Disney World. I hear that in all the Magic Kingdom, Captain Hook gives out the best hugs.

Move to Austin. Wear cowboy boots unironically and hide in the public library, the movie house with a bar in the lobby. Listen to Dolly Parton and let your heart break all over again. Drive to the Gulf and wade in the water – let this be your belated baptism, your last-ditch strike at holiness. Sink. It is too shallow to drown you, and you won’t die in Texas.

Keep losing yourself in distance, in lines on maps – there are thousands of roads, here, and your story has no fixed end point.

Remember: if all else fails, you could always try to swallow yourself whole.

[rach-out-loud]

my mother, she killed me; my father, he ate me

Everything started because Dad loved his brother.

Aunt Helen ran off with the gardener and Uncle M went off the deep end, just a little bit, because it turned out Paris Whatshisface wasn’t just a gardener, but some long-lost son of Troy Industries, old Priam’s kid slumming it in a post-college haze of indecision and adultery. Paris was young, younger than Uncle M, and he had money and looks and Aunt Helen didn’t need the family anymore, just left Hermione with her dad and packed up the Jag and didn’t tell anyone where she was going. Uncle M drank a lot, after that. Dad helped.

Mom stayed in the background during all of this, helping with this charity and that auxiliary function and generally ignoring Dad’s drunken call for war in the kitchen, sitting at the center island with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows while they drank whiskey out of heavy-bottomed glasses. They were going to steal Troy Industries’ best people, their best clients, all as payback for what Paris did to my uncle. “Sparta won’t take this shit,” Dad slurred, “Sparta – Sparta’s made of fucking warriors. Troy won’t even see it coming.”

Mom brushed past him on her way out the door and didn’t object when he rested his hand on her hip. She was wearing lipstick again, dressing nice, wearing heels. We thought our parents were working things out; we didn’t know that our father’s ridiculous plans for a hostile takeover would actually be put to use, we didn’t know how our mother would react to any of what was to come. We didn’t know she was already drifting away.

  My sister Iphigenia died when she was seventeen. She was hit by a car at the end of our own driveway by a woman who swerved to avoid a deer. She had blue eyes and a long nose and she was always our mother’s favorite; Mom cried for a month straight when she died, starting in the hospital when the doctor turned off the heart monitor and ending in hers and Dad’s bed, wrapped up in blankets and cradling Genie’s baby book to her chest. It rained at her funeral, all of us gathered in black under umbrellas, cold wind blowing through our mourning dress, the sky above us gray and dark. The flowers were falling apart on the coffin and Mom fell over when they started lowering it into the ground, splayed out on her hands and knees on the muddy grass and keening like a wounded animal, wailing over the open grave. Dad knelt down there with her, sinking into the mud, his wide hand white like a moth where it pressed flat against the small of her back. Chrys cried quietly, head up high. Hermione chewed on the cuff of her raincoat and Uncle M kept his hands on mine and Ori’s necks, rubbing his thumbs against our hairlines, holding us in place. Aunt Helen was already gone by then.

We were nine, then. My sister Chrysothemis was fourteen and spent most of the reception locked away with Mom. We were the first to arrive back at the house and Mom had to be carried into the front hall; her grief had paralyzed her, left her unable to do anything but cry. Dad and Uncle M each had an arm around her waist and when they set her on her feet she wobbled, took one shaky step toward the kitchen before dissolving to the floor in a puddle of tears. Uncle M took one look at her and headed toward the liquor cabinet, while Chrys sank to the floor and put her arms around our mother.

Dad shook his head and stepped over them. “Fucking Christ, ‘Nestra,” he said, “Pull yourself together,” and with that he ushered Ori and me into the next room. People were due at the house at any second.

Mom spent the rest of the evening cloistered away in her bedroom and Dad wound up taking the lead in her absence. He shook hands with relatives, family friends, trying to keep the feeling in the room level and calm. Guests picked at the food laid out on the dining room table and milled around the house, looking at pictures and talking in low tones, while I sat at the piano and played the same Beethoven sonata five times in a row. Ori hid underneath it, trying to avoid all the well-meaning aunts, and kept pulling on my foot.

I remember my father the best of that day: more than my mother’s tears, more than the cold wet graveyard. I remember his hands trembling on my shoulders as I played the piano, fingers tripping over the keys, Orestes lying on the floor still tugging at my foot. I finished the song and the notes melted away, dissipating into the noise of the room like mist, morning fog.

“Play it again, Elektra,” he’d said, “You know I like that one.”

I tilted my head back and saw only a broad chest, the underside of a jaw brushed with dark stubble. He squeezed my shoulders and didn’t move until I started the sonata over from the beginning, kissing the top of my head before he left. My father wasn’t a cold man, but he was still difficult to get close to; his heart beat for business deals and closing arguments and I will never forget how in that moment, on one of the worst days in our family’s long and storied memory, the great Agamemnon let his guard down for me, only for me.

  …

  It started out as a joke, I think; pillow talk, late-night stuff. I’d overheard Mom and her new boyfriend going on some nights after dinner, not long after Dad moved out. In the time between losing Genie and Dad leaving Mom had started acting like she was alone in the house, like my brother and I no longer existed. We were like antique furniture to her, Grecian sculptures, expensive paintings to be admired and ignored.

Ori was at practice and I was trying to do homework. I could hear them in the living room, see their profile through the open archway leading from the kitchen. Mom and Ag were curled up in front of the fireplace, Mom in her slip and her fur, sharing a bottle of wine. “Poison his whiskey,” she’d said, nuzzling his neck. “Let him choke on it.”

“Hit him with the car – put a nice big dent in his Mercedes.”

“Cut out his heart and feed it to the dog.”

“Slice him up very slowly, Pit and the Pendulum-style.”                          

They went on for hours – carving up my father in every way imaginable, rending the woman he was living with into imaginary pieces. It was sick, how easily it came to my mother, rolling off her tongue like conversation filler, mindless chatter.

“Hang her from the ceiling fan in his office by her hair,” she said, drinking deeply from her wineglass, and he just laughed, tilting her face toward his.

“Cut them all up,” Ag said, and Mom snickered, cuddling up against him. “Get the bitch and the kids and feed them to ‘Memnon. Just cut them up and stuff them into pie.”

The fire crackled in the hearth and I pressed my hand over my mouth. “How Shakespearian,” she’d giggled, and I couldn’t listen anymore.

  …

  Chrys remembers it like this: Dad strayed first. After a year of mourning Mom was starting to climb out of her sinkhole of depression, but neither she nor Dad could connect like they did before. Mom threw herself into her charity work and Dad hooked up with some woman from the office, a redhead named Cass in the PR department they’d poached in the huge aggressive merger they’d made with Troy Industries. Mom only started seeing Ag on the side when she figured out what Dad was doing – maybe to even the score, maybe just to make herself feel good, who the hell even knows anymore?

“It was Dad’s fault to begin with,” Chrys said, “He should have just kept it in his pants.”

Talking about it with Chrys makes me want to pull my hair out, scream in her face that it wasn’t just Dad. I remember a few weeks after the funeral, Dad’s cousin Ag coming around with the charity packets, the binders full of hopeless cases. Mom had been a social worker before she married Dad and it was like catnip to her: the possibility of putting pieces together, of making something broken whole again. Aegisthus was charming and handsome, dark and sharp and lean in a way that echoed the pictures I’d seen of Dad in his youth, back before college lacrosse was replaced by the remote control and late dinners alone. Dad was focused on the merger, throwing all his energy into it the way Mom did with the charity stuff, and it’s not like he was the only one spending all his time at the office: Mom and Ag spent a lot of late nights going over the plans for the foundation they were building in Genie’s name, there were a lot of long weekends spent far away from home.

It takes two to tango, is all I’m trying to say.

  …

  Ori and I were sixteen when everything went sour: I was a budding theatre geek, Ori had made junior varsity wrestling. Chrys was finishing up the last year of her undergrad and Mom nearly destroyed the house when she found out Dad had gotten the new head of PR pregnant.

“She’s trying to push over the china cabinet,” I whispered into the phone. I was hiding on the stairs, watching her rage. Ori was at practice. “Chrys, she’s throwing everything, I don’t –”

Chrys was patient. “Elle, she’s angry. She has every right to be angry.”

Another crash came from downstairs, this time from the kitchen – Mom screamed and I dropped the phone, flying down the stairs and over the broken glass, terrified of what I was running into and unable to stop myself from moving forward. Mom was backed up against the fridge with a bread knife in her hand, slashing the air with it so that the blade shone bright in the fluorescent lights overhead. Dad was standing at the island with his hands held out in front of him, watching her carefully, cautiously, the same way you’d eye a feral dog.

“Clytemnestra,” he said, low, authoritative. I’d never heard him use her full name before. “Clytemnestra, stop it.”

She slashed the air again. He hadn’t even moved. “If you think I’m letting your whore get all I’ve worked for,” she spat, “If you think one goddamn penny is going out of our daughter’s fund and into her pocket, then you are going to be very sorry.”

Dad regarded her strangely for a moment, his expression cold and unreadable, and then lunged forward so quickly that it took everyone by surprise. Mom shrieked and tried to get him with the knife but he had grabbed her by the wrists, twisting them in his large hands, bending them backwards as he tried to break her grip. Mom swore and shook and struggled and slashed at his face with the hand not holding the knife, dragging her nails down his cheek hard enough to draw blood. He grabbed her by the hair and started forcing her to the ground, twisting the blonde curls around his fingers while Mom scratched at him, still holding onto the knife.

I was frozen in the doorway: unable to move, unable to speak. I squeaked out something, my voice small, nearly inaudible, but it was enough to make both my parents look up in muted shock. They parted quickly: Dad released her wrists and Mom sprang up from the floor, dropping the knife in a way that the blade sliced into the linoleum floor. They retreated to their separate corners like boxers at the bell and Dad came toward me, arms outstretched, the ensuing hug stiff and reassuring at the same time. Mom glared at us from her place at the sink, fumbling through the purse she’d left on the nearby counter for her keys.

“You’re scaring her,” Dad said, hand on the back of my head, holding me to his chest. Mom narrowed her eyes at the both of us, ignoring his words as she leaned down and picked up the knife, tossing it casually into the sink like nothing had happened. The knife scraped against the sides of the metal basin as it fell, briefly filling the room with its sharp metallic ringing.

“You’ll regret this,” she said to Dad, and with that she swept out of the room, storming past the both of us and heading to the garage. The sound of the door rising, the car starting, was deafening in the silence that pooled between us. She drove off into the unknown and didn’t come back until morning.

Dad rented a condo downtown after that, a nice place near his office. He and Mom never officially separated.

Cousin Ag moved in a week later.

  …

  Months passed. The Foundation went public and Cass passed her due date, Ori and I made the honor roll. Hermione started coming by a lot – Chrys used to tease that she had a crush on Ori, which made us both laugh and gag, respectively. She was fourteen, just starting to get into makeup and boys, and liked to drape herself over my bed like a sweater and flip through the old magazines that had once been Genie’s, all the glossy-paged copies of Cosmo no one had the heart to throw away when she died.

“My mom called yesterday,” she said one night, leaning back against the headboard with her knees bent. Ori was doing crunches on my bedroom floor and Hermione was pretending she wasn’t watching him over the top of her magazine. I painted my toenails at my desk, my foot propped up on the lid of the little trash bin, and we could all hear the sounds of my mother and Ag going through their nightly routine floating up the stairs.

“What did she want?”

Hermione shrugged. “What does she ever want? Money, probably, and to drive Daddy crazy.” She flicked to the next page and added, bitterly, “Not like she ever wants to talk to me.”

“I’m sure she does,” Ori said from the floor, hands tucked behind his neck. He was huffing a little with the effort, he was always trying to be helpful. “Maybe she just doesn’t know what to say to you? Like, she feels bad you don’t get to come out that often, so she doesn’t want to bring it up, but everything’s just –”

“It’s not like that with them,” Hermione interrupted, “She didn’t want kids, did you know that? She got pregnant by accident.”

“How do you know?”

She glared at Ori and closed the magazine. “My birthday’s at the end of October. Do the math.”

Ori stretched out, breathing heavily, with his arms flat above him, fingers curling into the shaggy fringe of my pink throw rug as he counted nine months backwards, to February. We shared a look and Hermione set the magazine to the side, sliding down from the headboard and putting her hands over her eyes. It was terrible being stuck in the middle – Ori and I knew from experience.

 “He gets – he gets meaner when she calls.” Hermione rolled over onto her side, her back to us, and spoke to the wall. “But I think he likes it. He likes the fight, you know? Daddy doesn’t like losing, and so long as my mother keeps calling, it’s like he still thinks there’s a chance.”

Downstairs, Mom and Ag were finishing up with financial blackmail and working their way through physical dismemberment. We could hear them kissing. I shut the door.

  …

  The last time Dad attended one of the Foundation’s functions, Ori and I sat up on the dais, alternating between playing tic-tac-toe on an expensive cloth napkin with one of the souvenir pens and picking at the chocolate gateau heaped onto our fine china plates. Chrys kept lamenting the lack of people her own age to talk to and texted her roommate all night. The rented ballroom smelled like money and red wine and Mom was in her element, sweeping through the ballroom with all the lightness of a hummingbird, flitting from table to table with such quickness and grace that her feet barely seemed to touch the floor. Her eyes were bright, her laugh was loud. Cousin Ag couldn’t stop watching her. Genie’s picture was plastered up behind us, her face the size of a Cadillac and her gaze looking out into the middle distance, seeing nothing.

Dad was with us at the beginning; he’d sat at the opposite end of the table from my mother, elbow to elbow with me, and had left to mingle in the crowd almost as soon as Mom finished her speech. Chrys watched him leave and leaned onto her elbow, playing with her phone. “Mom’s not going to like this,” she’d muttered, her sing-song tone cryptic enough to make me look up from my game. Ori ran a line through his three O’s and I scanned the ballroom for our parents. Mom was talking to several of her hangers-on and Ag had disappeared into the crowd; Dad had found himself over by the bar, chatting with a woman in a high-collared green dress that showed off her legs, the hourglass of her waist. When he moved to tip the bartender I could see more clearly that the woman was Cass: Cass with her long red hair pinned up, Cass cradling her elbow in her palm, Dad’s whiskey held to her lips.

She snuck in, I think. Or came on the coattails of someone else’s invitation – Dad was only supposed to be there for appearances’ sake, and Mom had given strict instructions on how “that bitch” was not to be within 300 feet of her precious charity dinner. It was hard not to notice the incoming hurricane: people stared from all directions as Dad and Cass moved closer toward the center of the ballroom floor, closer than close as the band struck up a new song. Ori nudged me in the side and we looked as one toward our mother, whose grip had tightened considerably around the stem of her champagne flute.

Mom’s eyes never strayed from Dad while he danced, and I thought of the pictures I had seen of my parents early in their marriage, before the business, before Genie, before everything went wrong: a dinner party in college, their honeymoon in Greece, stuck under mistletoe at Sparta Tech’s first holiday party. They’d been together twenty years, they’d had four children together – there must have been some point where they had gotten along, some point where they loved each other. Mom came back up to the dais and took her seat at Chrys’s left, smiling thinly at a group of well-dressed acquaintances across the room. Ag practically flew to her side and took the empty chair beside her, his hand resting right between her shoulder blades as they watched the couple spin across the room with painfully calm expressions.

“Are you alright?” Chrys asked, and Mom didn’t look at her.

“Of course, darling,” Mom whispered, still smiling across the room, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  …

  My father was murdered less than a year later.

Uncle M found him; Dad hadn’t been to work in two days, wasn’t answering his phone.  My father wouldn’t miss work for anything – he broke his collarbone skiing one Christmas and was back at the office almost as soon as the plaster set. My uncle left the office before a meeting and found the condo door unlocked; I don’t know why he went in, what he expected to find, but I doubt that it was my father spread out on the living room sofa with a knife through his heart. It wasn’t Cass on the floor of their kitchen, lying face-down in a pool of her own blood. It wasn’t the boys strangled in their cribs, not the boys…

My half-brothers were twins: Telly and Pelops, old family names on Cass’s side. They were babies, barely six months old, all chubby legs and round faces. They had Dad’s hair, Cass’s nose. They were still learning how to walk. Chrys and Ori cried for a week when we learned what happened to them. I didn’t fare much better.

They didn’t deserve this. None of them did.

  …

  Mom was eerily calm the night the cops came to give us the news. She sat in the living room, my father’s ring still on her finger, and she took the news as graciously as she would if it had been the Homeowner’s Association at the door, telling her the grass needed to be cut. They didn’t ask her where she’d been, who she might have thought had done it. She made some noise about Troy Industries, anyway.

At the funeral, she sat in the front row with Ag and Chrys on either side, her head high, her eyes empty of tears and strife. At the funeral, she wore red.

Uncle M and Hermione came to the house afterwards, Uncle M quiet and brooding in the corner with his tumbler full of Macallens’s and his daughter at his side. Hermione was studying for the SATs, Aunt Helen was in Hawaii and had stopped returning his phone calls. Mom played the good hostess, greeting mourners at the door with Chrys and Ag, and everything felt like the worst kind of déjà vu: I sat at the piano during the reception, listening to the room move around me. Ori sat beside me, this time, taking up space on the bench and watching me plunk out the same three notes. No sonatas this time, no minuets or concertos. There was no one here who would want to hear it.

“I think Mom did something,” I said, and Ori put his hand over mine. “I think – I think she might have –”

“Elle. Elle, she couldn’t. She couldn’t.”

“How do you know? She said – you heard all the awful things she said, and you know she wasn’t the same after Genie, she might – she might have –”

I lifted my head to look at him and saw my own grief mirrored in his eyes; he was taller than me, now, and we could no longer pass for twins, but we still matched in the ways that counted – dark humor, green eyes, long-fingered hands good for piano, for palm reading. Of all our siblings, we looked the most like Dad. His mouth twisted with uncertainty and he balled his hands into fists against the keys, letting sour notes ring throughout the room; he couldn’t deny the strangeness of the situation, the damning nature of circumstance. Our mother had something to do with this – somehow, some way, she was involved in this, involved from the beginning. As far as I was concerned, her hands were as bloody as if she’d stabbed my father herself.

“If you’re right,” he said slowly, “If you’re right…Jesus fuck, Elle, what does it mean?”

I closed the lid of the piano, careful not to snap them shut over my brother’s resting hands. He drew them back in to his lap and looked at me, and I stared back, lifting my chin defiantly. Sparta’s made of warriors, I thought, and I felt like my father’s daughter.

“It means we do something about it.”

[rach-out-loud]

somebody loves you, rosie schulman

It’s Day 98 and Rosie wakes up to the sound of her phone buzzing on her nightstand. She rolls over, pulling at the covers, and buries her head beneath her pillow, trying to block out the noise. She shifts her hips and her shoulders at opposite angles so that her spine cracks, letting the popping of her stiff joints join in with the ceaseless vibration against the tabletop, and doesn’t move to shut off the alarm, letting it turn off by itself a minute later.

She stretches and dreads the inevitable moment where she will have to get up and shower, get up and eat breakfast, get up and drive to school. It’s a Friday: she has two classes in the morning and needs to buy groceries, she has to duck into work to pick up her schedule and at some point she needs to stop by the post office. Molly’s birthday thing is tonight and she’s meeting her for lunch around one. Sean is going to come by while she’s gone and pick up the rest of his stuff: the last of his books, the clothes he forgot to take with him, the stupid Bob Marley poster he insisted on hanging over the TV. Everything he left behind is packed and waiting for him in the living room, the last bits of his life with Rosie crammed up in cardboard boxes she got from the liquor store down the block.

Rosie takes a deep breath and emerges from her warm blanket cocoon like a dazed, blinking moth, swinging her legs over the side of the mattress. The bed feels so much bigger when she’s the only one in it.

  Of her two classes today, Women in Literature is the worst. Applied Calculus was about as insufferable as usual, but her thoughts are wandering worse than normal as Dr. Fish gives a droning lecture about the themes present in The Handmaid’s Tale and nearly the whole class is dozing off by now, falling under the spell of the flat tone of her voice. She likes Atwood, she likes this book, but with twenty minutes left in class Rosie regrets even showing up at all.

“But what about the, y’know, all the Bible stuff?” someone says from the back row, and when Dr. Fish turns her back on the class to write something on the whiteboard Rosie folds her arms on top of her desk, gives up on trying to take notes. Her phone vibrates in her purse and she digs it out as surreptitiously as she can, trying to be sly. Dr. Fish doesn’t notice. There are three new messages waiting for her: one from Molly reminding her about their lunch plans and two from her older brother.

Max volunteered to watch Sean pick up his stuff and to take his key when he leaves, letting himself into her apartment after she left for school and probably eating all her Captain Crunch while he waits. He’s been texting her on and off all morning, sending her dumb jokes and pictures of dogs in silly costumes in an effort to make her feel better. There’s a corgi in a lobster costume in the first message, Seans an asshole in the second. Want me 2 beat him up 4 u? I’ve got nunchucks!

You’re 29, she sends back, What do you need nunchucks for?

He doesn’t even wait a minute before he replies: Stuff like this, baby sis. Stuff like this.

  …

  “…and it’s like, ick, you know? Hoes before bros, all that sisterhood shit. I still can’t believe you haven’t, like, smashed in his windshield with a crowbar by now, Ro.”

They’re sitting in their usual booth at May-Jen, Molly wrapping lo mein noodles around her chopsticks and Rosie picking at her vegetable rice with a fork. They’ve been friends since their sophomore year of college and Rosie sometimes feels like Molly is her own inverted mirror: tall where she’s short, blonde where she’s brown, open where she’s closed. Molly watches Rosie over the rim of her water glass as she takes a long, slow sip and Rosie scrapes her fork along her plate, tired of the conversation.

“That’s what I would’ve done. That or, like, mailed his mom a copy of his internet history. Now that would’ve been good payback, am I right?”

Rosie shrugs. She doesn’t really want to talk about this anymore; she’s had a hard time explaining what happened to people in her social circle, can barely even talk to her mom about it, really. She cried at the hairdresser’s on Wednesday when the girl washing her hair asked how she’d been: Jenna pushed gloved fingers through the soap-slick sections of her hair as she ran the water over it and Rosie couldn’t stand it anymore, couldn’t take being touched like that. She sat up and bent over at the waist in the low leather chair, crying into her hands like a little kid and not caring that her hair was dripping all down the back of her shirt. Jenna dabbed at her face with the damp towel and rubbed her back while she cried, and Rosie just wanted to sink straight into the floor, feeling embarrassed and miserable and hurting in places she couldn’t name because wasn’t the rawness of their breakup supposed to have passed already? Shouldn’t the suffocating feeling wrapping itself around her throat at least have started to disappear by now?

I was breathing before I met him, she thinks now, sitting across from Molly in their sticky corner booth, I was, I was, but that time is so far back in her memory she honestly can’t remember anymore what life was like before he came into it; it’s dark and distant, a foreign country she does not have a passport for. He’s been her best friend since they were nine years old and that’s fifteen years of her life she’s spent with Sean Callahan, fifteen years of stories and stupid inside jokes, fifteen years spent with someone who was supposed to love her and care about her no matter what.

“Anyway, you should wear that red thing to the bar tonight,” Molly continues, talking through a mouthful of noodle. “You know, the flouncy thing with the collar? The one you had at the one-act whatever you dragged me to last month. You look so good in red, Ro, it’ll be perfect for later. You can look super-hot and make a bunch of guys drool into their drinks, and if Suck-Ass Sean shows up, you can make that loser see exactly what he’s missing.”

Rosie shrugs again and tries to smile. “Whatever you want, Moll. It’s your party.”

  …

  The post office isn’t an imposing building – it’s red brick and white aluminum siding, it looks like a house, not a federal office. She’s sitting in her car and listening to Betty Who, contemplating the thick manila envelopes in her hands: grad school applications, stamped and sealed and ready to be sent off to Berkeley, to Miami, to York and UChicago and Pitt. The correct forms have been filled out, the admission fees all cleared and paid for, and all that’s left is for her to mail her transcripts. There’s a sixth envelope lying on the passenger seat beside her, just as thick as all the others and the address of UB’s admissions department neatly printed across the front, but she can’t bring herself to look at that one, not right away.

There was a moment about four months ago where she thought there was only one application she might need to fill out; she thought long and hard about just throwing caution to the wind and betting everything on blue and white, chucking all the other forms and paperwork into the trash because her family was in Buffalo, Sean was in Buffalo, her whole life was in Buffalo, not California or Canada or wherever else her program might take her.

She was happy with him, then, happy with skinny, green-eyed Sean, who stood half a foot taller than her and had the biggest hands of anyone she knew. He gave her his class ring when they graduated from high school and she wore it, sometimes, on days when she was feeling low or lonely; it hung huge over her thin ring finger, slipping off without even needing to be touched. Before they became a couple she would wear it while she drove to school or to work and she was surprised at how much she liked the weight of it there. She liked being able to look at her left hand and pretend that she belonged to someone, that the garnet set in heavy yellow gold meant something more than You’re my best friend, Ro-Ro.

She gets out of the car and marches up to the fat blue mailbox sitting outside of the post office, wrenching open the door and stuffing all six envelopes inside before she can change her mind. It shuts with a satisfying clang, the metal clicking together as it closes, and Rosie looks down at her bare left hand and remembers that the ring is still sitting in a jewelry box at her parents’ house.

Sean will not be getting it back.

  …

  She texted him a time late Thursday night that he could come by and pick up his belongings and did not receive a response. Here are the things Rosie Schulman has wanted to tell Sean Callahan in the two weeks since their last real conversation:

There is a life-size sculpture of a pig sitting on the corner of Sweet Home Road, made entirely out of old scrap metal and perched on the curb in front of the new apartment complexes being put up, and it reminds her a lot of the porcelain pig statuettes his mom collected when they were in middle school.

Some scholars are saying that the Venus of Willendorf might not be a fertility sculpture after all, but might, in fact, be a self portrait. That would explain why the proportions are so weird: there were obviously no mirrors, then, and nothing that could really give a consistent reflection, so the sculptor might have only been able to go by the view she had of herself while looking down.

Bob Balaban circa Midnight Cowboy looks a lot like Mark Walker does today. Remember Mark Walker? That kid they went to high school with, the one he thought had a crush on her? He’s an actor, now, and he’s doing The Glass Menagerie downtown in a month – the posters are plastered all over Elmwood. She ran into him at Café Aroma recently and he looks good, she guesses, but seeing him and making the connection made the scene where Balaban blows Jon Voight in the porno theater a lot weirder than it already was.

She saw some of the posts on Facebook from the party he and Cara went to last weekend out at Luke’s place in Wheatfield. She didn’t expect to be invited, she really didn’t, but come on. Just because they aren’t friends anymore doesn’t mean his life is completely invisible to her, and if she could be blunt for a moment, did he get dressed in the dark that day? The shirt he wore is fucking hideous, like, old-couch-in-a-nursing-home-hideous, and Cara must be blind if she let people take pictures of him in that raggedy paisley thing.

A group of pugs is called a “grumble.” Isn’t that weird?

She drove past their old elementary school the other day and they knocked down the playground – they built up a new one and flattened the old into an extension of the parking lot. Does he ever think about that time when they were fourteen, that day the summer before freshman year where they spent almost the whole afternoon screwing around on the swings, dangling from the monkey bars? Does he remember how they sat on the jungle gym and ate popsicles while the sun went down, how they sat so close their knees touched, how she almost kissed him right there on the playground but couldn’t get up the courage to move any closer? She does. Right now she can’t stop thinking about it.

  …

  It’s close to six by the time she gets home, lugging two full grocery bags and her laptop carryall up the stairs to her apartment. She struggles to get her keys into the lock, but is glad to see that Max was good about remembering to close up her place when he left.

She flips on the lights once she gets inside, dropping her bags on the kitchen table and looking around the apartment. Everything looks the same as it did when she left this morning, and she isn’t sure what she was expecting to change; the only difference is the space she’d cleared for Sean’s boxes, their disappearance painfully noticeable in the empty corner by the door.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket and she’s grateful for the sudden distraction. It’s another stupid picture from Max: a squashy, happy pug dressed up like a Bantha monster from Star Wars, complete with a tiny Tusken Raider action figure stuck in a little saddle on his back. I know you’re flying Han Solo right now, the message below it reads, But these are not the feelings you’re looking for. Patient, you must be. Use the Force and you’ll be fine – I promise.

She wants to roll her eyes, maybe write back a snarky reply, but all she can do is swallow down the lump in her throat. She doesn’t send anything back.

  …

  She doesn’t really feel like going out to Goodbar, but she doesn’t want to disappoint Molly tonight, especially not on her birthday. She dresses up like Molly asked and gets to the bar at ten, mingling as best she can in the mixed crowd that showed up, but she makes it barely five minutes past midnight before she starts making up excuses to leave: early workday, feeling ill, ran into that guy who used to follow her to the parking lot at her old job. By the time she reaches Molly in her chain of goodbyes she’s nearly ready to just give up and bolt.

“You can’t just go!” Molly protests, wobbling precariously in her five-inch heels. She waves her hands exasperatedly when she talks, nearly slapping Rosie in the face with the one holding her iPhone. “Ro, there’s a guy playing pool over there I want you to meet, and he is so cute, you two are really going to –”

“Moll, I’m tired,” Rosie starts, and Molly grabs her by the shoulders, trying to back her in the direction of the billiard table. Rosie brushes her off as carefully as she can in the crowded space, tells her, “Molly. I don’t want to hook up with some rando from Goodbar, okay? I just want to go home.”

Molly narrows her eyes and gives her an appraising look; Molly is stuck halfway between “slightly inebriated” and “completely plastered” and her expression shifts suddenly from mildly annoyed into something strangely serious, understanding. Without any warning she throws her arms completely around Rosie’s neck and kisses her quick on the cheek. “You’re better than him,” she shout-whispers in her ear, “He’s a fucking six at best, and you – you’re, like, an eleven, Rosie. You’re a fucking eleven thousand.”

Molly hugs her tighter and Rosie doesn’t even mind that she’s choking a little because Molly Jarvis, ardent anti-commitment advocate and unofficial Queen of the Drunk Text, is telling her one of the nicest things she’s heard all day, and even through the hazy tequila cloud Molly is radiating like perfume Rosie knows she means it.

It’s started snowing by the time Rosie shrugs her jacket back on and walks out of the bar, soft white flakes falling gently to the wet ground as she jangles her keys in her pocket. It’s a short walk to where her car is parked, passing under the orange glow of the streetlights to the half-lot near the gas station. When she unlocks the car from the curb the headlights flash twice, like it’s welcoming her back, and Rosie smiles to herself. The streets are weirdly empty tonight – strange on Elmwood, especially for a Friday night – and she’s made it nearly all the way to the end of Hertel Avenue when the song comes on the radio, pulling up to the empty stop at North Park right as it really starts: There’s a port on a western bay, and it serves a hundred ships a day – lonely sailors pass the time away, and talk about their homes…

It is the stupidest thing to ever make her heart stop, but Rosie can’t help it: she’s frozen at the stoplight, hands curled tight at the wheel, and as Looking Glass rounds through the first verse she feels like all the oxygen has been ripped right out of her lungs. It’s been almost four months – four months! – and she should be over this by now, she knows she should, but everything is hitting her all at once and she feels like she’s been caught in an undertow of emotion: smothering, overpowering, her lungs filling up with sentimentality like saltwater.

Their song was a stupid one-hit wonder about a woman loving a man who couldn’t love her back, and she wants to hit herself in the face, almost, at the belated realization of what that means. It followed them around when they first started putting labels on what they were doing, playing in this restaurant and that Starbucks and at the dumb corner bar by his old apartment until it became a running joke between them: Sean messing up the chorus on purpose, changing the words the sea to a horse and your mom and Bruce Lee, all because it made her laugh.

They were good for each other, everyone said so: friends for ages, turning into something more after a series of bad breakups on both sides of the equation. He knew her better than anyone; knew she was allergic to strawberries and hated the color orange and why Phil Collins songs make her want to cry. He used to play with her hair while she studied on the living room floor, her back to the leg of the couch he’d stretch out on, and she loved that: loved the simple intimacy of being comfortable with someone, of letting her guard down.

They were good for each other until he decided that they weren’t, until he decided picking up where he left off with his ex-girlfriend was more important than anything they had going on between them, and by the time Rosie realized what had happened it was already too late. There’s no way to fix this; Sean has been ticking away inside her since she was nine years old and she could run to all four corners of the Earth, but there’d still be no escaping the empty spaces in her life Sean left behind, no way to hide from the phantom-limb feeling of him next to her in bed.

Looking Glass keeps singing about Brandy’s stupid silver locket and Rosie presses her hands over her eyes hard enough that she sees stars, not even caring if she’s smudging her eyeliner. She used to really like this song, even before Sean gave it the official stamp of “theirs,” and she hates that he took even that from her, that he twisted all the little pieces of her life until she couldn’t even hear a song on the damn radio without it making her think of him. She slams her hand against the dashboard without thinking and starts pushing buttons at random, switching from Mariah Carey to U2 to Taylor Swift to Elvis and with every change in station comes all the songs about loving someone you shouldn’t, wanting someone you shouldn’t, impossibly fast and impossibly accurate and she feels like the universe is just making fun of her, now, like her heart is just pouring out of every station.

She jerks the dial hard to the left and doesn’t know where she lands, only that Carly Simon flows out of her speakers at exactly the right point – and that you would never leave, but you gave away the things you loved, and one of them was me – and Rosie takes a breath so deep and so sharp that it hurts, something halfway between angry tears and hysterical laughter bubbling up in her throat. She turns the volume up as loud as it will go, so much so that the car shakes with it, bouncing slightly on its axles at the stoplight; turns the sound up so high she can feel every note vibrating inside of her, rattling all the way down to the marrow of her bones. The red lights at the intersection are warm and visible even through the darkness of her closed eyelids and she’s half-laughing, half-sobbing as she belts out the words, singing loudly, singing with enough force that she’s lightheaded from it, singing out until her throat hurts, singing until she can’t tell anymore if the painful ache filling up her chest is from sadness or from the song.

The numbers on the dashboard clock turn over, reading 12:39 in electric blue.

It’s Day 99. She keeps breathing.

[rach-out-loud]

Love and Other Drugs

The last time you kissed me You had your hand at my waist And syringes in your pocket And I realized that no matter How pretty it is, love is still a disease And I will always end up in the ICU.