“I can’t.”
“But why? This doesn’t make any sense!”
“I guess not. But I just can’t do this anymore. That sounds so fluffy and cliche and… well, not me. I know. But it’s also true.”
“But what’s changed?”
“Nothing. With me, anyway, nothing has changed. That’s the whole point. With you, though? I don’t know. It seems like nothing, at times. But at others… everything’s changed.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I know. I guess I’m sentimental. I also just obsess about things, so I assume everyone else does too.”
“I really don’t know what else I’m supposed to say.”
“Me neither.”
“So what now?
“I guess we don’t see each other for a few years. Or ever. You know. Whichever happens to happen.”
“…”
“So you’re not going to say anything? You’re not even going to make me feel like this is hard for you?”
“It IS hard for me.”
“Right.”
“It is! If you don’t want to believe me-”
“No, fine, I do, I do believe you. I just think you’ve never really appreciated how hard it is for me.”
“I do-”
“No, no, you don’t. Because you’ve forced me to make this step myself. True, in a way it’s been me hurting myself through you but you know how hard it is for me to stop hurting myself and if you really cared in any way close to what you claim, you would have made this step before me. But you didn’t. And now I have to. And you’ll hate me.”
“But I still don’t get it. I thought everything was fine.”
“It’s not.”
“You can’t?”
“You can?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I can’t.”
scene
Hugs
It was the day that he hugged her that he realized that she was in love with him. He’d just finished a gig, and he was sweating, still in the suit he always wore on stage. She ran up to him, smiling, her shoulders hunched forward and inward a little bit because of her lifetime of insecurity and the several years of painful shyness that she’d recently gotten over. She was nice, and he was glad that he’d met her. But when she hugged him, he felt her body melt into his and the embrace was perfect, comfortable, warming. There wasn’t anything suggestive in it, nothing sexual. But it was sensual, and that was worse. It was the sheer warmth and feeling in the embrace that made him realize that things had taken a turn down an alleyway that he wasn’t sure he was ready to enter into.
He wasn’t scared of love, nor was he scared of relationships. He did relationships well, and he’d always been thankful of that, especially when he saw his band members fall prey to their own effed up desires and needs that ended up only hurting them and everyone around them. He’d never been in the same band for more than two years, and every time the bands broke up, or fell apart as was usually the case, it was almost always triggered by one of the members having relationship issues. Of course, the underlying causes were deeper – drinking problems, drug addictions, depressions, inability to deal with the stress of constant touring and little or no money. But the immediate cause had always been a bad girlfriend or boyfriend, a lover posing an ultimatum, or a blowout fight that invited the neighbors to call the police.
He didn’t know why he hugged her the second time. They stood outside, smoking together, and he was glad that she’d come to see the show, like she said she would, even though she’d known that it would be the same set as the show they played two weeks ago, when she’d first seen him. They talked about innocuous things, like movies made by his favorite playwright and the place she’d grown up in. He told her about how he’d heard once that Disney had planned to build a theme park on the moon and call it LunarDisney. She’d told him about the way she knew her parents had done drugs in the 70s. There was nothing too personal in the conversation, nothing telling. She didn’t laugh at the things he said and he didn’t lean forward and tough her all the time. But at some point, almost out of the blue, he leaned forward and hugged her a second time, and the words “I’m glad I met you” seemed to hover between them, almost-but-not-quite-spoken by either or both of them.
He didn’t mean to lead her on and he was determined not to do so. After all, he was leaving soon, moving to another city, and she wasn’t even finished with college yet and wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while. They were going to be leading different lives and they both knew it. But she was in love with him, even though she hardly knew him, and while he wasn’t in love with her, he did feel a closeness that he didn’t know the origins of.
He worried that he would hurt her, especially after that second hug. They finished their cigarettes and discussed what each of them would be doing that night. Neither one suggested that they spend the night together, but he felt a vivid image tugging at his mind in which they woke up together and he smiled at her, knowing that she didn’t mind that his teeth were crooked and that she thought his smile was nice despite them.
She didn’t have any such visions. She didn’t even think he remembered her outside of their brief meetings. That was alright, because love, for her, wasn’t what it was for him. She loved many people, all at once, and felt deeply towards them all. She believed that people were good, and that there was something beautiful in everyone. She was naive in some ways, even though she’d been hurt enough in her life to know better. But she wasn’t expecting anything of him, not of him, and although she sometimes succumbed to wish fulfillment and painted an abstract in which the swirls of color represented her and another whom she loved, she still never verbally expressed that love to anyone.
They didn’t hug when they parted. They bade each other good night, and went their separate ways.
Raccoon
A Massive Attack song played and Jonathan drove faster and faster down the freeway. It was two in the morning, he was slightly tipsy, and he knew this was a bad idea. But the freeway was empty, so at worst, he thought, he would careen into the concrete divide and kill himself or else he would run over a raccoon. And he had a beef with them anyway. They’d dug into his garbage can so often that he’d realized that the animal control department wasn’t heeding his phone calls. His date – Tanya? Or Tina? – had said that raccoon were adorable.
“Adorable my ass,” Jonathan muttered and hit the steering wheel hard with the palm of his hand. He jumped as a honk sounded. Then he giggled at his own surprise. Then he stifled the giggle and glanced sideways, just to make sure that no one was watching him make such a stupid face. And then he remembered that he was alone, tipsy and driving on the freeway and he quickly brought his eyes to face front again. He had to straighten the car, which was veering into the right-hand lane. When he managed, he felt very proud of himself.
Tanya or Tina had been pretty. They’d danced together for a couple hours but she hadn’t agreed to come over to his apartment. “You’re drunk,” she’d said, frowning. “And I am too. Let’s go to a cafe and sober up.” He’d ask her if she’d agree to come to his apartment after they did that and she laughed very suddenly and said that probably not. Then she’d punched him on the arm, lightly, in a brotherly guyish kind of way that turned him off. So he’d invented a dog that he remembered he had to walk – because it was good to keep a good impression and not to close any doors with rude remarks, and everyone knew that girls liked guys who liked animals.
Jonathan wondered if he should actually get a dog. Then he realized that it would mean two things. First, he would need to walk it, pay for its shots at the vet, and in general stand having it around. Second, it would mean he wouldn’t be able to bring home girls who were allergic to dogs. And what if the girl of his dreams would be allergic to dogs?
Not that he was a romantic. No, he had no false notions of love or tenderness. He knew what he wanted and how to get it. His older brother was married and claimed to be happy, but Jonathan was pretty sure that he was actually miserable.
He wasn’t a complete bastard. He had friends who were girls, and he knew that women were people, too. But he didn’t really think that he wanted to have one around all the time. He’d been in several relationships in his life, but he always got tired of the girls he’d been with and so he’d ended it. His big brother told him that he was an immature man-child. Jonathan took that as a compliment.
He got home without causing an accident. There was a raccoon digging around in the trash can again. He tried to kick it and fell, swearing. So he went inside and tried calling animal control again, forgetting that they weren’t open at three in the morning.
Springtime Reactions
When spring came, the trees unfroze from their long slumber, the animals uncurled in their dens, and the flowers bloomed in their neat rows. The sun shone and warmed peoples’ skin and the wind blew and chilled them when they stood in the shade. The world took its course, as it does every year.
But inside Gray Gardens, the old fashioned townhouse that Laura and Bill occupied, things were changing in an entirely new way and everyone was out of sorts.
“Bill! Bill, where are you?” Laura pounded down the stairs, yelling at the top of her voice and making the chandelier rattle.
“I’m up here!”
Laura stopped, turned, sighed, and climbed right back up the wide staircase. She tracked Bill’s voice to the second upstairs bathroom, where he had taken to shaving in the mornings after Laura had complained that she was sick of finding his tiny face-hairs stuck to the main bathroom’s sink. As she pounded on the door, he nicked himself and swore loudly.
“Can’t you knock like a human being?” he said. “Geez, it’s like having an untrained chimpanzee for a wife sometimes,” he added under his breath, rolling his eyes at himself in the mirror.
“The catering company called and they’re saying that the sushi is non-kosher. Your father is going to murder me. Literally.”
“No, he’s not. He might flay you but he won’t kill you.”
“Well, I won’t look very attractive without my skin on, will I? You need to call them and tell them that we’re not going to pay for it if it’s not kosher.”
“Why can’t you do it? I thought you were taking care of the caterers.”
“I tried, didn’t I? Their secretary got very snippy with me. It was as if she forgot that I was the one paying her.”
“You’re not. The catering company is paying her.”
“Whatever. Will you call them?”
“Fine, fine, I will.”
Bill and Laura’s daughter was getting married and the wedding was that evening, in Gray Garden’s spacious backyard. Nothing was going right, and it wasn’t even nine in the morning yet. Bill had already gotten an angry email from the band they’d hired, telling him that they couldn’t possibly arrive two hours earlier than planned, because they were on tour and that their management was already pissed off that they’d agreed to a private engagement like this one. Laura had wept twice that morning – once on the phone with her daughter, who was sobbing about how scared she was and a second time because her beautifully manicured nail had broken inside her expensive hairdo. Bill had been on the verge of tears himself when he’d found out that there was mold growing out of the corner of the bathroom wall again – he’d thought they’d gotten that taken care of last year.
Spring calmly hovered in the air outside, but inside it seemed to be only eliciting allergic reactions.
Golden Morning
Glen unfolded the morning newspaper carefully, making sure not to rip any part of it. He was one of the only people in his building who still got a paper newspaper delivered. He knew this because he was always awake early enough to receive the paper straight from the deliveryman’s hands, and he became friendly with him over time and asked him whether there were many deliveries to be made in that neighborhood. The deliveryman just shook his head and smiled sadly. It was too early for him to engage in conversation and he answered Glen’s questions in monosyllables, releasing the words from his mouth as if they were precious bits of energy that he had to conserve.
Although Glen wasn’t personally invested in any business that had to do with the news – he wasn’t a reporter, nor did he own a publication of any sort – he still felt a deep and abiding kinship that dated back to the days of his early childhood, when he would watch his father iron the newspaper with gloved hands before unfolding it carefully and reading it in its entirety over his long breakfast. The ritual fascinated him as a child, and he saw something sacred in it. His mother had always told him not to disturb his father while he was reading the newspaper, and Glen, always an obedient child, still remembered the hushed mornings when he would play with his heavy metal train set, moving the cars quietly over the little rails and mouthing the “woo-woo!” that, at other times of day, he would shout out exuberantly every time the train ran under the little bridge he’d constructed over it with three hardcover books.
Although Glen didn’t iron the newspaper – he didn’t mind getting his hands a little dirty from the smudgy ink – he read the paper front to back every morning before heading out to work. It took him three cups of milky coffee, drunk slowly as it cooled to room temperature and below, to finish the pages, which, these days, seemed to be filled with more advertisements than articles.
When he finished the paper, he would fold it up just as carefully, and then would go downstairs and put it in the mailbox of apartment 14, where old Mr. Spiegal lived. Old Mr. Spiegal had stopped getting a pension when the company he’d worked for had gone bankrupt and had had to cancel his newspaper subscription in order to cut down on costs. He had been gruffly thankful when Glen offered to give him the newspaper every morning.
Glen’s ritualized morning ended with the action of popping the neatly folded newspaper into Mr. Spiegal’s mailbox. After he did that, he was never quite sure what to do next, and had to improvise every morning anew. He still hadn’t found a new job after the factory had laid him off, and although he continued applying for new positions, there were many days during which his only obligation was to avoid spending more money than he needed to. He had a nest-egg from his parents that he’d never touched until three months ago when he found himself, for the first time since high school, out of work.
This morning, he decided to go for a walk. He had a phone interview scheduled for the afternoon, and nothing else to do until then. The sun had come out from behind the fog that had shrouded it in the early hours and the day was beginning to look like the first real spring day of the year.
Walking down the pathway from the dilapidated apartment building, Glen stretched his arms above his head and tugged each hand with the other, the better to stretch his shoulders. As he turned right onto the sidewalks, he let his arms fall down to his sides, shook his head, took a deep breath, and began to walk.
There was nowhere in town that was unfamiliar to him anymore. He’d walked every inch of it, even ducking into a few private yards, just to see if there was a magic garden concealed by the stocky buildings that his them.
This morning, he decided to take the path that led up to the only hill in town, where the wealthy people lived. He found himself turning to this familiar walk more and more often lately, and he had a suspicion that there lurked in his breast some illogical hope that being around moneyed people would give him luck of some sort.
The Little German Boy
“Everything will be just fine,” Greta murmured. She rocked back and forth with the small, frightened child in her lap, and hoped that he didn’t feel her racing heart and her fear. He clung to her neck and sobbed, voicelessly. He didn’t even pull on his nose or sniffle. He just let his tears and nose run and his shoulders shake, all in eerie silence. Greta was horrified that any child his age – she guessed he was four or five, although he was small and terribly thin – could control himself this way. The boy that she’d had when she was younger had been rambunctious, always running around, putting his hands into everything, shouting at the top of his voice until he tired himself out and plopped down in the comfiest spot in the house for a nap, just like an enthusiastic kitten might do.
“Shh, shh,” Greta began and stopped herself immediately. No, no, she shouldn’t, she mustn’t shush him. The poor thing hadn’t spoken a word, hadn’t made a sound since entering her house. She knew why, or she thought she knew why, but she didn’t want to think about it, and succeeded in pushing the complicated, conflicting notions out of her mind. She hoped that her son wouldn’t get home tonight. He hadn’t said he would, but sometimes he popped by after a night of drinking with the men, and when that happened, she never knew what kind of mood he’d be in. He was often weepy and melancholy as a drunk, and he would want to discuss her memories of him as a boy. But sometimes he would get himself into a rage and would talk at Greta, pacing around and around the small kitchen like a caged tiger at a circus. When he was like that, she tried to make herself small. He frightened her then and reminded her of her husband, may God rest his fiery soul and protect him from ending up in Hell.
The sobs abated and Greta pulled back from the child, trying to look into his face. He allowed her to do so, becoming limp like a rag doll in her arms and looking down at his little hands instead of up into her eyes. He’d only met her gaze once, when she’d found him in the outhouse, shivering, and then there’d been such fear – such absolute terror! – in his hungry eyes that Greta was almost thankful that she hadn’t needed to face it again.
A shout from outside made them both jump. Greta listened, and recognized the sounds of a parade starting to go through the village streets. The soldiers paraded often – theirs was a small town, and they didn’t have much work to do in it in between ventures to other towns in the area to recruit or into the countryside to scour it for runaways. As the boots began to pound the street, the boy in Greta’s arms started to shiver violently and then tried to leap off of her.
She struggled to hold him close, but he was like a wild animal, scratching at her hands and kicking his feet, trying to get away. When he bit her finger, she let out a moan of pain and let go and he scampered off through the house. Greta was off the couch in a second, after him. He ran from one small room to another, trying to open doors and windows, but they were all locked – Greta had locked them quickly and silently when she’d brought him in. She’d pulled the shades down too. When he couldn’t find a way out, he crawled right into the chimney and attempted climbing up it, frantically, falling down over and over again, try as he might to catch a handhold.
Greta knelt in front of the hearth and held out her arms to him, ignoring the pain in her finger. “Come, I’ll protect you,” she whispered. “They won’t get you. They won’t come here. You’re safe. You’re my little boy – I have peroxide, we can dye your hair, everything will be alright. My little blue-eyed boy.”
He stared at her, his sea-blue eyes stretched wide. He touched his hair, so filthy that Greta didn’t know whether it was brown or black. He met her eyes again, and she wondered whether someone like her had betrayed him once already, because there was such wariness in his face, such uncertainty.
“Everything is going to be alright, I promise. I’ll protect you,” she said again. Slowly, ever so slowly, he crawled out the fireplace and allowed her to whisk him away to the kitchen, where she made him a hot cup of tea as that parade went by outside.
Misaligned
Signs drew themselves in the air and Adam watched them, impatient. The spirits were being sluggish today, and he didn’t know whether it was the guilt that weighed on his mind or their own fathomless reasons, but something seemed to be going wrong. The symbols and shapes they sketched in the air seemed muddy, and though he could understand them, they took longer to decipher.
“What are you doing?” he asked loudly. He got no response, of course. He knew that they spoke on the rarest of occasions. But he needed their guidance today, of all days, and as he knelt down and began to pray to them, he felt the previous hours crashing down on him in all their horrible reality.
Being Grace
Counting down from ten never worked for Grace. If anything, it only exacerbated her temper and focused it, creating a keener point to her already sharp tongue, so that when she opened her mouth and spoke, the words that emerged were more painful, more disdainful, and more disrespectful. When she reacted without thinking, she’d usually stumble around with inadequate phrases that blunted the fierce criticism; she kept more employees this way.
Grace was not, to say the least, graceful. Besides her forge-heat temper, she was also frequently rude – not on purpose, but because the niceties of polite small talk and banter seemed like a waste of time and she hadn’t the patience for them. She was also leery of letting others do any work for her and preferred counting on herself. She despised debts of any sort and had difficulty thanking those who helped her. Those who loved her, though, accepted this in her, and learned to become deaf to her tactless observations and blind to her sometimes embarrassing behavior.
She ran a small business, which was unfortunate for it forced her to hire others and trust them with at least a certain amount of responsibility. She always had the uncomfortable feeling that she was turning into a cliche mega-boss-lady, a woman universally feared for her tight bun and neatness. At the same time, she hated the thought that people would look at her and think “Oh, she’s really all mushy inside.”
It was hard for her, being Grace. She often wondered whether there was anything she could do about it.
Everything Unlike
Rhonda appeared unconcerned. Her hair looked particularly well that day, and she knew that everybody in the restaurant must be looking at her, arching their eyebrows in jealousy or appreciation. The person across from her was arching his eyebrows to, but with anger.
“So you’re lying to me,” he stated.
“No, William. I’m not.”
“Then you’re lying to yourself.”
“That might be a possibility,” Rhonda admitted. She didn’t think it was so, but if she were lying to herself she probably wouldn’t know it. She was an excellent liar.
“What on earth can you want with me? Why do you keep toying with me?” William’s voice was still barely above a whisper. He had an impeccable sense of propriety, and he disliked having this conversation in the crowded eating-house, but she had brought it up.
Rhonda knew, of course, that both the subject matter and the setting would pain him, but for some reason she didn’t mind. It was odd, especially since she was so incredibly convinced that she loved him again. She had changed her mind various times, but she’d never seen herself as cruel for doing so. Even William didn’t see her as cruel. He saw her as Rhonda – nothing more, nothing less, and he didn’t really understand what he meant by that, only that it made sense to him.
“I’m not toying with you, dear, I really mean it this time,” she said.
“You’ve meant it before.”
“True.”
Rhonda patted her hair delicately, making sure that the tumble of curls at the back was still only half-collapsed, looking as if it had fallen out of an arrangement and just happened to rest so beautifully on the nape of her neck as it did. She adored this sort of pretended natural style. Her clothing was similarly on the verge of looking windswept and rumpled, and her face was made-up very lightly, as if she hadn’t finished applying the proper cosmetics before she’d had to rush up and go somewhere.
William loved all this about her, no matter how fake it was. He often convinced himself that there was no artifice involved at all. He thought that she was so consistent in her inconsistencies that they must be genuine.
She read him like a book. Though not exactly cruel, she had a streak of playfulness that made her fickle, and there was no one who could stand it in her the way William did. So Rhonda used him. She knew she used him, but she also knew that he enjoyed it on some perverse level.
It never even occurred to her to feel guilty.
A Pleasant Surprise – A Writer’s Tale
I tell people that I write. Because I do. But I have a hard time calling myself a writer. I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone I was an author, either, even though I’m working on my third novel right now.
However, I just had one of the coolest writing experiences I’ve ever had, and one which I’m eager to remember in years to come. Which is why I’m writing a second blog post today, something I rarely, if ever, do. Ready? My tale might not be exciting to anyone who isn’t me, but here goes.
My current work in progress includes some six main characters. I wrote the first ten pages of it about a year ago, in this blog in fact [if you’re interested, search for “Mr. and Mrs. Adams,” “Amanda,” and “Heather.”] During my semester at Sarah Lawrence this year, I took a writing class, and began to write this novel in earnest.
About five months ago, I wrote a scene in which Amanda, one of my characters, is drunk and having a breakdown of sorts. She has never been drunk before, is introverted, is scared of her own passions and hides behind her instincts as a caregiver much of the time. As the listener, she can remain safe and closed off while still maintaining meaningful relationships with people she cares about.
Now, this scene I wrote so many months ago was, I knew, going to fit in only towards the very end of the novel. I haven’t looked at the scene in months, waiting for the right time to go back to it and insert it where I wanted it to go. The day before yesterday, I was writing the scene that I knew would directly precede it, in which Amanda’s friend makes her a drink, and Amanda, for the first time ever, decides to be reckless and takes it.
In the scene I wrote the other day, I had her friend making her a White Russian. The next scene I wrote was about other characters. Today, I wanted to put in the scene I’d written all those months ago, and so I scrolled to the very bottom of my file to reread it and see what I was going to have to change. And here’s the kicker. I’d written there that Amanda was drunk on “milky White Russians.”
!!!
I had NO IDEA that I’d specified in that scene what she’d been drinking! I didn’t remember AT ALL that I’d already had the idea of what I wanted her to be drunk on! When I’d written the scene a couple days ago, I’d decided to go for White Russians because I thought it was the kind of yummy alcoholic drink that her friend would mix in order to lure Amanda into drinking!
But it seems that Amanda told me ages ago that she wanted her first experience with alcohol to be with this particular drink. It seems that even her friend, a relatively minor side-character, knew in February already that she was going to make Amanda a White Russian for her first alcoholic beverage. It seems that I know my characters even better than I thought, or else that they’ve been driving me to write what they feel is the truth for them.
So. Maybe not the most exciting tale for anyone who hasn’t had the experience of their writing taking on a life of its own. But let me tell you, I’m going to be grinning about this revelation all day long.
EDIT: Another thing – in this same scene, written months ago, I’d mentioned homesickness for her mother. In a scene I wrote about a week ago, Amanda was missing her father and feeling homesick. So yeah, I think Amanda is really quite alive in my mind. Which is exciting.
Slightly Ignorant 