Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (22 page)

“Which other times?” I ask.

“Don’t do that,” he says. “I’m not going to lie to you about what you and I were. Are.”

“I know,” I say. “I know. I’ll apologize to her tomorrow.”

“If she ’s speaking to me tomorrow,” he says.

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

“Right,” he says. His hand is still on my knee. “Why wouldn’t she be? I’ll call her later.”

I lean into him and reach for the cigarettes in his shirt pocket, and brush my arm against his while he lights my cigarette.

“I should get Chrissie,” I say, but I don’t look away from him. The look in his eyes could melt glass.

 

 

Chrissie’s laughter from
across the room interrupts our silent negotiation. She’s standing at the bar with Alan and a girl in a tissue-thin tank top. Alan’s already got his hand on Tank Top Girl’s hip, and Chrissie’s holding something in her hand that is clearly not a Shirley Temple and probably not straight soda. Her eyes are scanning the room, and I assume she’s looking not for me but for a guy she can use to make Alan jealous, because she doesn’t realize she’s already lost this fight.

“I should get her out of here,” I say. “Where’d you find that asshole?”

“Please,” says Brian. “If I weren’t here and you weren’t babysitting, you’d have gone home with him already.”

“I go home with a lot of assholes,” I say. “At least I don’t love any of them anymore.”

“Really?” says Brian.

“I’m over Jay,” I say. “We don’t speak. And anyway, he told me once that love was not a real thing because it was
comprised of too many subsidiary emotions
.”

I wait for Brian to laugh, but he doesn’t.

“Jay wasn’t the one I was talking about,” he says finally.

“Stop,” I say. I look away from him and then turn back.

Brian told me once that I was the only woman in the world he was completely honest with. He said my problem with relationships is that I make everyone feel like it’s good enough to be who they actually are. At the time I had thought these were both good things.

“Trust me on this,” he’d said. “Appreciate the liars. When people don’t hide things, it means they don’t care enough to be afraid of losing you.”

Chrissie finally seems to realize she’s been outplayed and starts to head back to the table. Behind her, Alan has his hand on the small of Tank Top Girl’s back and is leaning in to her ear. I watch Chrissie walk to us. I can tell her heels have started to hurt her, because she’s scooting her feet across the floor instead of picking them up all the way. As she gets closer, I slide away from Brian. Chrissie stops halfway between the bar and our table and looks over her shoulder to see if Alan’s even noticed she’s gone. She’s smart enough to look only a little disappointed when she sees he’s still thoroughly engrossed in Tank Top Girl’s earlobe. When she sits back down at the table, I slide her half-full drink away from her.

“Hey,” she says, “I’m thirsty.”

“You should’ve thought about that before you asked Alan to put rum in your drink.”

“You should have thought about that before you brought me to a bar.”

“Touché,” I say. “We’re leaving soon.”

Chrissie looks curiously at Brian, then glances back at me, and I try to relax my face into blank nonchalance, as if she’s the only one immature enough to imagine this night ending differently.

It’s barely after midnight when I finish my cigarette and Chrissie’s drink, and Chrissie pretends she wants to stay through the end of the folksinger. It’s the worst pretext ever: the folksinger is singing a song that’s about either a blow job or her psych medication, and she keeps wailing,
You cannot make me swallow,
and no one wants to listen to that. I’m hugging Brian good-bye and apologizing again when the phone rings. It’s Tia. I step outside because I can’t hear her over the background noise.

“Where the fuck are you?” she says.

“I’m in North Carolina,” I say, “with Chrissie. I told you we were going.”

“Did you?” she says. “Well, look, get back here. Uncle Bobby died. Everyone’s at the hospital.”

“OK,” I say, and I take a minute to go get Chrissie, not because I’m broken up, but because I feel like I’m supposed to be and I can’t walk back in there too composed.

 

 

When I tell Chrissie,
she doesn’t lose it at first. We’re standing outside the bar, and then she sits on the toadstool bench outside the place with her arms folded across her chest and the overhead light washing out her makeup. She looks like such a little kid then that I’m sorry I brought her here to begin with. For a minute she doesn’t say anything, and then the floodgates open. It’s the first time I’ve actually seen her cry in years, and it’s so much that crying isn’t even the right word for it. Brian comes out to check on us but when he sees her he walks to the corner of the parking lot.

“He doesn’t even fucking talk to me,” Chrissie says, when she can talk again. “All summer I’ve been there, and he doesn’t even fucking talk to me. I would have sat there with him. I would have sat in that hospital with him all fucking summer long.”

“He’s trying to be a good dad,” I say. “He’s trying to protect you. He’s trying to be a man about things.”

“Yeah, well. He’s being an asshole,” she says.

“They don’t really know the difference,” I say. “You’ll go home. He’ll feel better. He won’t say it, but he will.”

“
I
won’t feel better,” she says, “I won’t ever feel better.”

“You will,” I say, which may be a lie.

 

 

The best thing
about the two years I spent with Jay is that splitting the rent let me pay off my credit cards, so I’m able to put Chrissie on a last-minute red-eye flight to Baltimore. Tia promises to pick her up there when the flight lands. I don’t go back with her because of the car and because there’s nothing for me to do there yet. The next few days will be comfort and shifting obligations, but no one will miss me or need me the way Chrissie’s father needs her right now. My own will take a few days to fly back from India, and his current girlfriend, someone he met on a cruise to London, will be with him to comfort him in the meantime. Aunt Edie will have Tia. I am, for a moment, absurdly jealous of Chrissie, because there is not a single person in the world my mere presence will comfort right now, not a single place I need to be more than this one.

Brian’s waiting in my car outside the airport. He drives without asking me which hotel, and I know if I end up at his apartment I’m not sleeping on the couch, but the thought of waking up next to him suddenly feels more terrifying than comforting, more like undoing something than fixing it.

“Stop,” I say. “Stop the car.”

“We’re on the highway,” he says.

“So get off the fucking highway, then,” I say. At first I think he’s going to ignore me, but he gets off at the next exit and pulls into the parking lot of a Waffle House just past the exit ramp.

“What’s wrong now?” he asks.

I don’t answer him, I just get out of the car and slam the door. It’s still Saturday night in the parking lot—more drunk strangers and other people’s problems than I can handle right now—so, after watching a girl vomit into the bushes and then go back to screaming at someone on her cell phone, I bang on the window until Brian leans over and opens the passenger-side door. I sit back in the seat and fasten my seat belt while he leans his forehead against the steering wheel. If I didn’t know him better, I might think he was praying. I turn away from him and look out the windshield, into the window of the Waffle House in front of us.

If you have ever been to a pancake house in the middle of the night, then you know how resolutely depressing it is—you live in one of the few cities where it is never actually the middle of the night. In a city like this one, the first hour or so after bar time may be upbeat, because people are still trying to get something from the night: joy or sex or gradual sobriety. At around five a.m. you’ll see the first waves of people beginning the new day or ending the night with sleepless exuberance. But between those hours, the pancake house is a dead zone for possibility. Everyone is there for lack of something: good and nourishing food, sufficient coordination to drive the rest of the way home, an appropriate person to love or fuck, a reason to get up the next morning.

I allow myself to say out loud that maybe it is simple lack, and not some unbreakable connection, that has kept Brian and me attached to each other all this time; that for a long time all I’ve been in his presence is the absence of better things. He stays quiet. Through the window, I watch a middle-aged man in a trucker hat stare at the back silhouette of a girl in ripped fishnets and a too-tight miniskirt, not exactly lecherously, but like she is a planet he has never been to, something so far out of this reality that he might as well look carefully.

“Just fucking go,” I say to Brian. “I’ll be fine if you just go.”

I can hear him breathing, and his arm is touching mine, but just barely.

“This is me,” he says. “I’m not going to leave you. And anyway, it’s your goddamn car, and I’m not walking home.”

“Fine, then. Stay,” I say.

I look away from the Waffle House window and back toward the highway. The traffic keeps going by, candy-painted SUVs, slick sports cars, an eighteen-wheeler.

“I should take you to your hotel,” Brian says quietly, but he doesn’t start the engine and he doesn’t get out of the car, and we sit there like that, waiting for something better to present itself.

F
or making honor roll you got these stupid Mylar balloons. They were silver on the back and red or blue or pink on the front, with CONGRATULATIONS written in big clashing letters. The balloons were supplied by the army recruiters who had an office across the street from our football field, and they always stuck a green and white U.S. Army sticker on the back. If you lived in Lakewood, then when you got a balloon your parents picked you up, or you drove yourself home with it in the backseat. Either way, when you got it home, you waited for your balloon to deflate slowly; and when it finally did, your mother smoothed out the wrinkles and put it on a wall, or in an album, or in a storage box somewhere, if you already had so many that another would be redundant. If you lived in Eastdale, then the stupid balloon got in your way the whole time you were walking home.

Geena Johnson and I lived in Eastdale. I knew her name already—everybody did—but Geena was a girl like sunlight: if you were a girl like I was back then, you didn’t look at her directly. Usually there were girls following Geena’s lead, often literally, wobbling behind her in platform boots they had just barely learned to walk in, but she was alone the first day she actually spoke to me. From the top of the hill where our high school began, I had seen her walking ahead of me, briskly and by herself. When she got to the chain-link fence encircling the water dam at the bottom of the hill, Geena threw her backpack over the top of the fence, balanced the heel of her boot against its wobbly surface, and expertly hoisted herself over, barely breaking stride. When I hopped the fence a few moments later, I took my time. Even in sneakers I was not as slick as Geena, and plus, the balloon kept hitting the side of my face and trying to pop itself on the top of the fence. I was less awkward crossing the high, rickety bridge that was probably the reason the water dam shortcut was closed off to begin with. I took some perverse pleasure in knowing that a fall at the right angle could have killed me, one slip, and no more Crystal.

On the other side of the dam, home surprised me. I always took a minute to recognize my own neighborhood. It seemed like every day a new apartment building was being built or an older store or house torn down. Things changed quickly in those years: Eastdale pushed into the suburb of Lakewood from one side, while white flight created suburbs of the suburbs on the other. This was the
new
New South: same rules, new languages. The people who could afford to leave Lakewood left; the ones who couldn’t put up better fences. The rest of us were left in Eastdale: old houses, garden apartments, signs in Spanish and Vietnamese. We adapted well enough; we could all curse in Spanish and we’d skip school for noodle soup as soon as we’d skip for McDonald’s. The handful of white kids who still lived in Eastdale adopted linguistic affectations with varying degrees of success and would have nothing to do with the Lakewood kids. Eastdale kids and Lakewood kids walked on opposite sides of the hallway and ate on opposite sides of the cafeteria and probably would have worn opposite-colored clothes if they could have coordinated it without communicating. The neighborhood in the immediate vicinity of our high school was called The Crossroads; don’t ever let anyone tell you that the South is big on subtlety.

Geena and I weren’t big on subtlety, either—not then, anyway. We were fourteen; she was flashy, I was brave the way you are when you don’t know what you have to lose. When I emerged on the other side of the dam and walked the wrong way down the side of the park-way just because I could, I was not surprised to see her ahead of me, doing the same. My balloon mirrored our walk in a hazy silver film: ELENA’SCHICKENARROZCONPOLLO29.99MANICUREANDPEDICUREPAWNSHOPKIM’SMARKETCALLHOMECHEAPPHONECARDS!

A block from my apartment building, I stopped at the 7-Eleven to waste the few minutes my shortcut across the bridge had saved. I spent five minutes debating the merits of blue raspberry versus cherry limeade Slurpee, before blending them into a disgusting purple slush. Geena was strolling around the store like she owned it and was taking inventory, and when she finally made it to the Slurpee machine, she picked grape and was quick about it. We waited in line at the same time, but not together. The man behind the counter grinned as I laid my change on the counter with one hand and tried to balance my Slurpee and balloon in the other. He pointed upward at the bobbing surface, and read: Congratulations. He smiled and looked me over.