| |  | | | | August 30, 2016 | Letter No. 49 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hola mis queridas Lennys!
Welcome to our Late Summer Fiction Issue. Although currently in real life I am ignoring the fact that summer is over and my beach days are numbered, the cool breeze that has replaced my recent oven-baked existence within the confines of Brooklyn is surely welcome. The beach is definitely my favorite place to read, and I envision a lot of you enjoying these stories while soaking up the sun — whether you're in the sand or perched upon your favorite sunny spot in your house like a cat.
I love this fiction issue because it features some of our very own Lenny women. Our Jessica Grose is an amazing editor and human to be around 24-7, but did you know she's also a fiction writer? Her new book Soulmates — about a woman whose ex-husband turns up dead on the front page of the New York Post and the things she discovers while investigating his death — is a really funny thriller that you won't be able to put down. I was lucky enough to read it a few months back and came very close to canceling dinner plans at my favorite pizza place just so I could finish reading it, which I think says a lot. I am so excited that we are excerpting the first chapter here for you.
We also have a story from our contributing writer, Kaitlyn Greenidge, who's the newest addition to our team. Everything she has written for us has found a place on my list of all-time-favorite things we have published at Lenny. We also have a brand-spanking-new story by Lena Dunham — how could we not? I'm always in awe of how much good Lena can put out in the world at all times. Her short story "The Mechanic" is no exception.
And finally, we have a story from Jackie Thomas-Kennedy. It is a funny and awkward and loving tale of a woman called to assist in the pregnancy of her ex-girlfriend from college. All in all, these stories are about the things women do for love — old love and new love, a temporary love or a forever love. They will offer you some respite from the real world and maybe get you thinking about the things you love in your life — which is always a nice way to spend your time!
Until next time,
Laia
xx | | | | | | | | | | | | Namaslay | | | | By Jessica Grose | | |
DANA
I was waiting for coffee at the bodega down the street from my office when I saw his eyes blazing back at me from the cover of the New York Post. The cheap metal prongs of the newsstand were blocking the headline, and most of his face, but the eyes alone tipped me off. I hadn't seen my husband in five years, but I would recognize those limpid brown headlights anywhere. Making sure that none of my fellow lawyers were in the shop watching me pick up a tawdry rag, I walked three steps to the newsstand and, breath quickening, took a copy.
Ethan's face had thinned out since I last saw him. There were severe hollows in his cheeks where there was once a downy roundness from one too many weeknight beers. In the photo he had a full beard, and his curly dark hair, which he had always trimmed close to the scalp, now fell in dreadlock-style tendrils across his brow. He had aged considerably in just a short time, but not badly. He had a smattering of sexy crow's-feet ringing his eyes, the kind you get from hours spent outside. His skin had taken on a tan, faintly leathery quality.
It took me a minute to realize he wasn't alone on the cover.
She was there, too. Amaya's clean olive skin still glowed as if it were backlit, the product of a diet based primarily on kelp. Her dark-blond hair was pinned back in a dancer's bun. Both Ethan and Amaya had their hands pressed together as if in prayer.
The photo appeared to be a promotional image from one of their videos. Ethan and Amaya had made instructional videos for married people who want to be "cosmically connected through the ancient practice of yoga." Each video opened with Ethan and Amaya locked in a ball of intertwined arms and legs — some ridiculously complicated pose that made their limbs look like braids of lanyard. After they unfolded, but before the opening titles rolled on-screen, Amaya bowed to the camera and said slowly, in an even, condescending tone often used by preschool teachers, "We want to teach you how to share each other's consciousness. With our help, you can have the closest marriage."
I committed that line to memory after watching and re-watching every video on their YouTube channel — even the one that was just a dog nosing around a pile of sand. In those bitter months after Ethan left, I had a Google Alert for his name, and for Amaya's name, and then for their names together. The videos popped up about six months after they ran off together. At first I tried to figure out where the videos were made. It had to be San Francisco, right? Isn't that where people go when they leave their wives for yoga instructors? But I never could find any trace of Ethan or Amaya in my public records searches. There was no evidence of an apartment, or a new driver's license, or even incorporation data for When Two Become One, the name of their "company," according to the videos. Ethan had shut down his Facebook account right before he left me and never reactivated it. The videos were the only real thing I had.
Ethan's face looking up at me from the cover of the Post brought everything welling back up. I was so wrapped up in searching his new crow's-feet that I had missed the headline splashed in luridly enormous type across the Post's front page: nama-slay: yoga couple found dead in new mexico cave.
I managed to slide the Post out of the metal rack without rattling it — no small feat, since my hands were shaking. I passed it across the counter to the clerk along with a dollar, turned, and walked quickly out the door. "Miss, miss! Your coffee!" I heard the clerk shout after me, but I no longer needed the caffeine.
I walked out onto Eighth Avenue and held my hand up over my eyes. The late-May sun — which seemed so cheerful when I left my apartment this morning — now felt oppressive as it bounced off the spotless glass of the office buildings. I briefly considered going back home and telling my boss, Phil, that I had eaten some bad oysters the night before and needed to take a sick day, but of course that wasn't an option. Phil is a forty-eight-year-old man who wakes up at 4:45 every morning to train for triathlons. Phil works eighty-hour weeks. Phil has 4 percent body fat, which he will find some way to work into the conversation within five minutes of meeting you. Phil refers to himself in the third person, and he never, ever gets sick. "Sickness is for the weak!" Phil says. If I were to call in sick, it would have to be from a hospital bed.
Staggering up to Fifty-Eighth Street, I wondered if there was some mistake. Maybe Ethan wasn't really dead. Maybe Amaya left him for some other poor sucker, and that was the body found in the New Mexico cave. She didn't seem like someone who valued a commitment overmuch.
I held on to this bitter fantasy as I rode the fourteen floors up to my office. I barely nodded at the receptionist, and mumbled a very curt "Morning" to my assistant, Katie, before scurrying into my office and closing the door. Katie is a real go-getter and desperate to please me. She's good at her job but anxiously chatty, and I didn't want to risk being pulled into exchanging pleasantries with her. Not today. I sat down in my desk chair and, holding my breath, opened up the Post.
It took the search team more than a month to locate the bodies of Ethan "Kai" Powell and Ruth "Amaya" Walters in the rangelands of northern New Mexico. The lovebirds were reported missing from a swanky yoga spa called the Zuni Retreat, where they were instructors, on April 24. The owner of the retreat, John "Yoni" Brooks, notified local police a week after Powell and Walters failed to show up to teach their morning Aztec sun salutation class at 6 a.m. on the 17th.
Though the heights of the bodies found a few hours from Taos match the victims' descriptions, Powell and Walters were so badly decomposed after exposure to the elements that their identities had to be verified through dental records.
Details of the couple's deaths are hazy at this point, but a sharpened piece of obsidian was found in between the bodies.
That's as far as I got before my tears started dotting the photos next to the article — one of Amaya and Ethan wrapped in an upside-down yogic embrace, their arms entwined and their legs pointed up to the sky, plus smaller photos of Ethan from his college yearbook and Amaya from her pimply, brunette high school days.
There was no way Ethan was still alive. It's tough to argue with dental records. Though I had wished Ethan and Amaya dead nearly every day for twelve months after they fled New York, their actual demise gave me no joy. What I had really wanted was for Amaya to get a disfiguring facial fungus, or, if I'm really honest, for Ethan to get abandoned the same way I did. I never truly longed for their bodies to be splayed out, alone, in the rural Southwest.
But I still felt angry with him. Ethan and I had been together for a decade, since we were sophomores in college. We called each other "partner" in goofy cowboy voices. I thought we were a team, and I suppose we were — until we weren't. That's the thing I could never forgive him for, leaving me all alone to pick through the rubble of the relationship he detonated.
I had spent countless hours on the couch of a very understanding, maternally soft therapist to get myself over Ethan. Entire days went by now when I didn't imagine him standing in the vestibule of our apartment with a duffel bag on his shoulder, about to walk out of my life. He had written me a good-bye note that said he needed to go live with Amaya. "That is where my true self lies," he wrote. He didn't even have the courage to say it to my face.
But now I didn't know how to reconcile any of this. New Mexico? The Zuni Retreat? "Kai"? Dead? This wasn't at all what I had fantasized about Ethan's new life. So I called my sister, Beth. She's a graduate student in twentieth-century American history. She has been working on her dissertation for four years. She always picks up her phone.
"What's up?" Beth said sleepily. It was only nine, so she was probably still in bed, nursing her first coffee of the day.
"Ethan's dead." I tried to say this as calmly as possible, but I couldn't hide the hysterical edge to my voice.
"Wait, what?" Beth said, immediately perking up.
"He's dead. Amaya's dead, too. It's on the cover of the New York Post." I forced the words out between gulps of air.
"Holy shit," Beth said, almost in a whisper. She'd wanted him dead since he left me. She'd said it so many times. I wonder if some kind of vague guilt stunned her into uncharacteristic silence.
"That's all you have to say? My husband is dead."
I could tell Beth wanted to reply that Ethan wasn't really my husband anymore. I know how her mind works. But she took a long pause instead and said, "I'm so, so sorry."
That's when I started to cry. Really cry, not just that first sprinkling of tears that smeared the newsprint. Ethan's dimples from that sweet collegiate portrait started dissolving, which made me cry harder. I covered my mouth and tried to keep quiet.
When my tears had somewhat subsided, Beth cautiously asked, "What happened?"
"Their bodies were found in a cave in fucking New Mexico. Police don't know that many details yet. Some kind of sharp object was found near them, though." The anger I had worked so hard to quell came back up, bilious. This never would have happened if he hadn't left me.
"Oh my god," Beth gasped. "Do you want to come over here? I'll take care of you."
"I think I need to be alone right now," I said, surprising myself. "Besides, there's so much going on at work I can't take a mysterious personal day."
Beth sighed loudly. "I can't believe you give a fuck about work right now. This is important, Dana. You're allowed to deal with a monumental life issue."
"Well, we can't all be perpetual graduate students, Beth." My job had been my ballast for years. It paid me well, and it kept me grounded. Beth could never understand that; to her a job was meant to give pleasure.
Though she'd usually rise to this kind of bait, Beth said only, "Okay, okay. I'm here if you need me. Please call me to check in. I'm worried about you."
I sniffed out a moment of composure. "I'm okay. I'll be okay. I just want to know what really happened."
Want to find out what really happened? Preorder Soulmates by clicking here! #namaslay
From the forthcoming book SOULMATES by Jessica Grose. Copyright © 2016 by Jessica Grose. To be published on September 27, 2016 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
Jessica Grose is Lenny's editor in chief. | | | | | | | | | | | | I Love Betty | | | | By Kaitlyn Greenidge | | |
"I love Betty," Henry Thompson said. He said it every morning as soon as he woke up. He said it to his pillow and the yellow wall beside his bed. He said it to the nurse who gently pulled the false teeth from his mouth and to the orderly who brought his breakfast, to the television screen that loomed over his bed on a metal arm, to the windows of the recreation room where he was wheeled, singing love along the way. At every meal, when the other patients murmured grace or stubbornly stayed silent and refused to give thanksgiving, he said, over meats and vegetables, "I love Betty."
When Henry started saying "I love Betty," his children were confused. His wife had been dead for three years. A few days after Henry began his declarations, his children, Douglass and Claire, met with Henry's doctor in her office at the nursing home.
The woman took out a small plastic model of the brain and pulled it apart into four different sections. She pointed at each quadrant, stickered in red and blue veins. She explained that Henry didn't know what he was saying, that this was a further stage of his dementia, that this nursing home might not have the care he would need. "You have some decisions to make," she said.
While the doctor spoke, Claire looked at the plastic model. She knew she should be paying closer attention, but she couldn't. The doctor said it was a symptom, that the words her father repeated were arbitrary. But Claire didn't believe that. Her father had gotten so lost in the sweet thrills of nostalgia that he didn't ever want to return to mundane communication again. And why should he? she thought, and smiled.
Douglass nudged her arm. "Are you even listening?"
"Of course," Claire said.
One in the morning, a few nights later, Douglass lay in bed watching television, his wife, Nia, asleep beside him. The phone on the night table beside Douglass vibrated. He answered on the first buzz.
"I've been thinking," Claire said. He knew it was his sister without looking at the screen. She was the only person who called that late.
"I'm listening," Douglass said.
Claire took a deep breath. "I was really sad about Pop. But maybe there's something to celebrate here."
"Life's not always a celebration, Claire," Douglass said.
"No, not like celebrating to deny anything. I mean celebrating to accept who he is now. Like, I think it's remarkable. Because I think it's really special, what's happening here …"
"What's happening here, Claire?"
"You know that storytelling workshop I've been taking?" she said conspiratorially.
Douglass sighed. Storytelling was the newest of Claire's manias — after the pottery class and the Thai cooking class and the Tuvan throat singing chorus and the time she believed she could blow glass.
"Don't sigh at me. Keith, the boy who runs my storytelling workshop, he's always saying, 'Everyone's got a story.' He says telling stories taps into our deepest empathy."
"Really," Douglass said. Claire had a knack for making gurus out of her teachers, for taking their rudely obvious statements as words of wisdom.
Claire clucked her tongue. "Listen, Dougy, everyone's got a story and this one is going to be ours. I'll edit it all together and I'll keep a copy and you'll get a copy and I'll send one out and maybe it will get on the radio."
"I don't know, Claire. It's ghoulish." Beside him, Nia turned onto her stomach.
"It's remarkable," Claire said.
"Losing your mind is remarkable?"
"No, love is. The triumph of love is remarkable." Douglass's ears burned in embarrassment for the both of them — Claire for saying it, himself for having to listen to it.
Not bothering to turn over, facedown into her pillow, loud enough for Claire to hear on the other end of the line, Nia said, "Tell that old hippie to go back to bed."
Claire laughed. "Tell Nia I said hi. Tell her 'I love you too, boo boo.'"
"It's late, Claire."
"All right. I'll let you two sleep. But first you have to promise me you'll do it. I won't let you off the line until you say you'll do it."
"I'll do it," Douglass said. "Is that all?"
"That's all," Claire giggled. She hung up before Douglass could.
Claire lived in the same apartment she'd had since she graduated from college, twenty years before. Douglass had lived there too, when he was younger and still loved Claire.
It's where Claire first took up melancholia, like the lavender oil she'd rubbed on her wrists as a teenager. She drank too much on weeknights and cavalierly slept in when she should have been at her job. Laughing, she proclaimed herself slothful at 25, a spinster at 28, a failed artist at 33. What once had seemed ludicrous predictions — Claire had always had men around, she had always been talented, her singing had made Pop weep — had all come thuddingly true.
Now, at 42, real sadness rolled off her in waves. But Claire was like those old women who douse themselves in ever-heavier splashes of their favorite perfume because their noses get too used to the smell. She still told all the old jokes about her solitary, shiftless life: the successive cats she called her children, the Sundays spent facedown on the sofa listening to Coltrane.
But those details of her daily life weren't bohemian anymore. Claire stunk of sadness so sharply, it made Douglass's eyes water. And it was painful to see that she didn't know it, that she still thought it was a light and delicate aroma, something spicy and mysterious and intriguing. She was blind to the actuality, that her unhappiness was so palpable Douglass was afraid the scent of it would rub off on him and that he too would be left reeking of loneliness.
When Douglass came into her apartment, he only hugged Claire halfway, kept a space of air between the two of them. He was ashamed of this, but he still did it.
Claire pretended not to notice. She pulled back and Douglass looked around. When he had moved out, she had continued her life of whimsy with a vengeance. She told everyone it was good Douglass left, because now she could paint her walls pink. The whole apartment was an anemic peach.
Bunched up on a corner of the couch were a blanket and pillow. Douglass knew in a flash that this was Claire's bed, her current resting place during her nights of whirring insomnia. Back in the days of Douglass and Claire, the two of them slept till noon and lived on cans of tuna fish, bags of corner-store candy, and 40s. Judging from the dainty saucer on the side table, dusted with bright crumbs of children's cereal, Claire still followed that diet.
They had lived like that for nearly a decade and a half, until Douglass found his wife five years ago. Nia was a sweet enough girl, but she'd taken one look at the Jamaica Plain apartment and told Douglass there'd be no truck with her as long as he lived like that. "Nia says we live like animals," Douglass had said, amazed at first. "And not even wild ones. She says we live like house pets waiting for our master to come home."
Nia was smart. When Douglass complained about work or his friends, she didn't egg him on like Claire did. And when he let his fears slip out, she didn't turn them into a joke. Nia took him seriously. She didn't dress herself in winking knowingness. She didn't find irony particularly attractive or delicious. He'd been wary when they began and she spoke enthusiastically about a West African dance class — he'd instinctively cringed. But Nia picked single things to love — when he finally saw her dance, she moved with a dedication and quiet resolve that struck Douglass to his core. He quickly realized that a girl that keen was worth keeping. Especially at his age — 34 when he met her. Pops and Ma, when she was alive, had been happy, so happy about Nia. But not Claire. Douglass moved into Nia's and whenever he ran into Claire she said, "Tell Nia life's good at the puppy pound." Claire said, "Let Nia know I've managed to keep my litter box clean all on my own."
In response, Douglass had tried to turn his heart against Claire. He constructed the case against her piece by piece. To anyone who would listen, he argued against Claire's capriciousness; her dreaminess; most damning of all, her lack of a husband and children. Eventually, the arguments stuck, and he convinced himself that he had always secretly held his sister and their shiftless life together in contempt.
"It's just not mature to be living like that," was how Douglass summed it up to Nia. "It had to end sometime."
Now, before Douglass on the coffee table was a small, gray box with thick black wires stuck to it. Claire gestured for him to sit down. She began to set up the recording equipment, and Douglass found himself impressed. Her face took on a concentration he had not seen on it since she was a child. He watched as she tested the sound levels, slid on a pair of headphones, squinted at the digital readout in front of her. When she caught him looking, she grinned and winked both eyes. Douglass looked down. A microphone rounded its way up to his mouth.
"Do you ever remember Pop saying stuff like 'I love Betty' when we were kids?"
"Of course not, you know that, Claire."
Claire made eyes at the recorder. "It's for the record."
"For the record, they weren't touchy-feely."
Claire leaned forward. "I saw them, once."
"Doing what?"
"I saw them. I was maybe nine or ten. I wanted Pop to fix my bicycle chain. I stayed up, waiting for him to come home from work. And I saw them. They were sitting at the kitchen table, side by side, and they were kissing each other on the cheeks, real quick. I'd never seen them do anything like it. I shut the door and went back to bed."
Douglass knew, with a pang, that she was lying. He wasn't sure why she was, but he knew that this story was untrue. He could feel her watching him, waiting. Douglass looked down at his hands. Between them the red light on the recorder glowed.
Finally Douglass said, "Well, that's romantic, I guess." He looked up and he saw that she knew that he knew she was lying. But he wasn't going to call her on it. He would humor her.
Claire smiled smaller, more of a wince. "Well, wanna know what I think? Before he could protest, she continued, "I think they did it that way because it was sweeter."
"Claire," Douglass laughed, uncomfortable. "C'mon."
"No, now that we know his true feelings. I think he kissed Ma that way because it was the sweetest."
Douglass shifted in his chair. "Do you have another question?"
"Do you think it's harder to love other people, now that we're grown up and knowing how much he loved her?" Claire said it quickly, breathlessly, as if she'd just discovered something.
"No."
"That's it? Just no? You're not gonna elaborate?"
"Claire, I don't want to talk about this with you. I don't think that's true." Douglass started to get up, and Claire put her hand on his arm.
"But I need to get each of our viewpoints about love to have this thing make any sense."
"Claire, Nia needs the car to get to dance class. Is that really it? This is what you need?"
Claire nodded her head, vigorously, tucking her chin and opening her eyes wide. A pantomime of an eager little girl. If I were a kinder person, Douglass thought, I would laugh. But he only felt angry with her. He sighed and sat back down and folded his hands one into the other. He was silent.
Claire lifted her chin, her eyes cool now. "You can say anything," she said. "Just make it up if you have to."
Douglass stood up and leaned over the table. He put his mouth close to the wire hatching of the microphone. He knew his voice would hurt, amplified through her headphones. He said distinctly, looking at Claire, speaking so clearly that she had to bend her head under the force of his voice:
"Love is great, it's the greatest thing in the world. I'm glad Ma and Pop had it and I'm glad that Pop has it still. I wish all of Claire's listeners have it, but I especially want my big sister to know that she has it." And then he reached out and pushed the stop button.
When she walked into his room, he was alone. He was in bed, a blue knit blanket around his shoulders. Claire set the tape recorder on his tray. "Hi, Pop," she said, and he gave her a limp wave of his hand, an uninterested "I love Betty." He was focused on a Satchel Paige documentary on the television. She laid the wires for the microphone on the tray. When she pressed the button on the machine, her own voice sprang into the room: it was the part she'd recorded as narration.
She had written it in a burst of inspiration, and she could hear the pride in her own voice as the recording played: "When my father says I love Betty, it means anything and everything. It means he is hungry, or tired, or wants the station changed on the television, or he is constipated." She liked that last part. It made it sound like she had a sense of humor.
The ending line was one she'd recorded a dozen times, trying to get the inflection right. She had wanted it to sound thoughtful and winsome. She had wanted someone to hear her voice and fall in love with her. She had wanted Douglass to hear her voice and love her again. She had recorded this section in her apartment last night, before bed. She had been in her nightdress, a mug of peach schnapps beside her for courage. She had leaned over the tape recorder and said, staring at the red blinking light, willing her mind blank so that the words could be the truest versions of themselves: "I love Betty means life. I love Betty means life is always love."
Her voice cut off sharply. The red light blinked. The recording was finished. She could start taping.
"Ready, Pop?"
Henry said nothing. He was looking steadily at the television, his eyes darting back and forth, following the plays of a very old game.
"Pop, what's your name?"
Silence.
"Pop, I need you to say your name for the microphone." She took his chin in her hands and turned his face toward her.
He looked her in the eye. "I love Betty," he said. And Claire thought with all certainty, so sure, she thought: I love Betty means nothing.
Henry moved his eyes from the screen. He was looking into her eyes now and he said it again. "I love Betty."
Claire felt her father's weak skin in her hands. She smelt his old man's breath, staler than stale, smelling of flatness and closed spaces no matter how often he opened his mouth, no matter how alive the sentences he made with that breath sounded.
"I love Betty," he said again. Claire couldn't look him in the eye.
She put her hand to her father's mouth to stop the sound. She felt her father's tongue, wet, his lips, insistent, the soft knuck of false teeth against her palm as he continued to say into skin, "I love Betty." Always in the present tense, never in the past. It was nonsense to listen to and nonsense to stop it, but she pressed harder against her father's mouth, cupped her other hand gently against the back of his head, pressed until she couldn't feel the words on her hands anymore, only the wet of her father's breath against her knuckles.
Kaitlyn Greenidge is Lenny's contributing writer and the author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman. | | | | | | | | | | | | Let Me Do This | | | | By Jackie Thomas-Kennedy | | |
So Birdie Gradowski wasn't actually having contractions, but by the time she figured that out I was already at her house. She looked the same as she always had: pale, except for the pink skin around her nose ring; a string of tiny gold freckles across her throat; blonde hair slightly oily and curling at the shoulders. She was eating a plain tortilla when she answered the door. Her maternity overalls were black denim with spatters of fake green paint.
"Wait a minute," she said, leaning against the door frame. "What is this?"
"I'm Ruth's backup doula today," I said. "She's still at that home birth in Amherst. She asked me to swing by and make sure you're OK."
"I'm OK." Birdie looked down at her clogs, marbled with dried mud. "I asked the collective not to send you if I needed something."
"I was the only person available," I said, which was true, though I still felt a flicker of guilt. I hid my face behind my hands. "Pretend I'm not me. How are you feeling?"
"Fine now. It was just this rippling sensation I get sometimes." She rubbed her belly. Her blue nail polish was chipped on both thumbs. "He doesn't want to come out. If he's not out by Monday, they'll have to induce."
He. She was going to have a son. In the two years we'd dated at Smith, Birdie Gradowski and I had agreed that we would probably marry, and we would probably have children, and we would probably name them Prudence, Patience, and Honor. Our imaginary children were never boys.
"Well, you look good." I dropped my hands and hoisted my canvas bag high on my shoulder.
"You can go, Nora," she said. "I'll text Ruth and tell her I'm all right."
Then she winced, her lower lip puckered, her eyes narrowed. It was her old oncoming-migraine look, her too-much-Champagne look. It had been four years since she left me, but I believed I could still read her face.
"How about I get you a glass of water first?" I said, and she nodded and stepped back to let me in.
Birdie's neighborhood: clapboard houses and renovated barns, solar panels and skylights, Volvos old enough to be boxy, Obama stickers, compost bins. They were mostly the homes of retired professors and psychologists. Birdie was the local Young Wife With Palette and Easel, or so I'd gathered from Instagram. Through her kitchen windows you could see the Connecticut River, flung across the valley like a sequined belt.
She sat in a chair and drank two Mason jars of water, lightly skimming her toes on the back of her sleeping chocolate Lab.
"I'm OK now," she said. "You don't have to stay."
"I want to," I said.
"It's too weird, Nora," she mumbled.
"Only if you make it weird."
"Fine." She tipped her head back and closed her eyes. "Normally, a person standing where you are would ask about Sam."
"How's your husband?" In college, the few times I'd met him — a bespectacled, sheepish redhead in clean corduroys — it seemed to me that he was forcing himself not to gloat.
"No, ask me about Sam."
I picked at a scab on my elbow.
"How is Sam."
"He's great. He's out running errands. This morning we realized we have no diapers." She reached into the pocket of her overalls and withdrew two lollipops, the kind bank tellers hand out to children, the kind you can eat in one bite. "He knows I love these, so he makes a small cash deposit every day."
"What a prince."
"Don't make me wish I hadn't let you in." She stood up, waddled over to her fridge, took out a package of bacon, and opened it with kitchen shears.
"You're not vegan anymore?"
"I knew you'd say that." She set down a cast-iron skillet, turned on a low flame.
"It's for Olympia."
The dog wagged her tail at the sound of her name.
"I feel the need to spoil her," Birdie said. "She got sprayed by a skunk yesterday, and I had to give her a tomato-soup bath. She was not exactly pleased."
"Sit down," I said. "Let me do this." I was leaning against her sink, and I felt a few drops of cool water seep into my shirt.
"You hate touching raw meat." She addressed the skillet.
"Let me do it. I want to be useful."
She cleared her throat, the way she did to suppress a laugh. Then she handed the package to me.
"Knock yourself out," she said.
I used a fork to peel the gleaming strips from their bed of plastic. The sizzle was a reassuring sound, and for several minutes it replaced the need for conversation. The dog stayed at my side, nose twitching, while Birdie drifted to her sliding glass doors, hands on hips, rocking side to side. The wind was strong enough to push her lawn chairs around.
"What were you thinking? On the drive over here, I mean."
"Well, I didn't think you'd be too happy to see me, for one thing."
She was standing so that her belly brushed the glass. I tried not to look at her breasts, which had nearly doubled in size. There was a skin tag under the right one that had always reminded me of a steel-cut oat.
"Were you wondering what the house looked like?" Birdie said.
Smoke rose from the skillet. Olympia licked my ankle in anticipation.
"I saw it on Instagram. Right after your in-laws bought it for you."
"They didn't buy it," she said. "They just helped us out."
I stabbed a piece of bacon and flipped it; the underside had gone crispy and dark.
"Hope Olympia likes this stuff a bit overdone."
"Olympia isn't picky. She's eaten menstrual blood off a towel," Birdie said, then frowned in regret. She was thinking, probably, of how badly stained our old sheets used to be. Or perhaps only I was thinking of that.
"I know you want to look around," she said. "Go ahead."
"You mean your house?"
She nodded.
"You think I want to go through your drawers or something?"
"I would never turn down a chance to go through someone's drawers." She laughed. "Neither would you. At least not back when I knew you."
It occurred to me, waving smoke from my face, that there might be something in the house she wanted me to find: an old letter I'd written, for instance, even though she'd made an effort to return everything I'd ever given her years ago. As I recalled, there was at least one gift she'd never given back — a jade necklace, its green flowers delicate as sugar roses. Maybe I'd find it upstairs, tangled with the wedding pearls I assumed she kept in her jewelry box.
"OK, sold," I said, setting down the fork, suddenly worried she'd change her mind.
What were you thinking? On the drive over here, I mean.
I was thinking, Birdie Gradowski in labor? Impossible. Pale Birdie, so easily felled, sunburned from May to September. She couldn't eat pepper without getting a rash around her mouth. She'd been born missing a rib, which explained both the smallness of her waist and her remarkable flexibility. At Smith she skipped so many classes — claiming migraines and sore throats — that she almost didn't graduate. Then she left me for Sam, an adjunct professor at UMass, and for a while it seemed that neither of us would graduate. I wouldn't because of my post-Birdie despondency; she wouldn't because she was newly in love.
Roaming their house, I discovered that she and Sam shared a king-size bed, that it was made up with a paisley duvet and an abundance of pillows, that Birdie's nightstand was tidy — tissues, an issue of Mother Jones —and that his was a jumble of two-inch-thick legal thrillers and remote controls. On the floor, a humidifier released paltry clouds, and I thought of the nights Birdie used to make spaetzle, pushing the batter through a colander with a spatula, face flushed from the steaming pots, floor slick with ice water, as if rain had fallen in our apartment.
Downstairs, Olympia barked. I heard Birdie tell her to be patient. I imagined the bacon grease on her fingers and, feeling nauseated, tugged open the top dresser drawer. Boxer briefs, thick white socks, faint odor of bleach, no letters. Next drawer: pink linen pajama set, calendula sachet. No jewelry box in sight.
"Find anything good?" Birdie said from the doorway.
"Do you actually wear pajama sets now?"
"Sam just texted. He's about twenty minutes away." She held my bag up by its straps. "Brought your stuff so you wouldn't forget it."
This was it, then. I sank onto the edge of their bed.
"You're kicking me out."
"I can't believe you were actually looking in our drawers," she said, shaking her head. A frown line formed a thin bridge between her brows.
"You said I could!"
"I was teasing you. It was stupid, I guess." She left my bag on the floor and sat next to me, holding her belly. "I just wanted to be alone for a minute."
"Well, don't worry, I'm leaving," I said, but I didn't move. I saw that one of her overall straps was twisted. I could smell her peppermint lip balm, the jojoba oil on her skin. When I leaned toward her, my head wouldn't stop until my cheek was against her thigh, until I lay with my head in her lap like a feverish child. She patted my shoulder impatiently, then tried tracing the line of my brows with a fingertip. This, I knew, had nothing to do with me. This was Birdie trying out her mother-posture, imagining herself as the healer of countless future wounds.
"I still hate Sam," I said. "I can't help it."
"Shh," she said.
"Why did you guys buy this place, anyway? You know this is my hometown." At Smith, our group of friends had called me Townie. "Didn't you figure you'd keep running into me?"
"Well." She laughed. "I figured one day you might move out of your parents' house."
"I'm only there temporarily," I said. Her fingertips traced my brow. It felt good, it felt like we were back in our old apartment, with its black-eyed Susans all over the kitchen linoleum. "Remember how our landlady made corned beef and cabbage every Sunday?"
"Christ, we burned so much incense because of that. Cabbage and sandalwood." She made a gagging sound.
"Remember Patience, Prudence, and Honor?"
She stiffened and dropped her hand.
"Get up."
I sat up.
"So this is what you do? Is this why you became a doula? Are you trying to raise my blood pressure here?" She reached for my bag and peered inside. "Essential oils," she said. "A CD of fucking spa music. And what's this? A menu? 'Quinoa salad with citrus dressing, choice of tofu or grilled chicken.'"
"I cook meals for my postpartum clients," I said.
She let the paper fall back in the bag and handed the whole thing to me. Her jaw, I noticed, was not as angular as it used to be; pregnancy had given her a slight double chin.
"Can you imagine if I'd been in labor? What if I'd really needed your help?"
"I would have helped you," I said. "You know I would have."
The pained look returned. I could tell she was holding her breath. Her green irises were edged with red, like pieces of flame lettuce.
"Contraction?"
"No."
"Birdie?"
She shook her head.
"Would you tell me if you were?"
She exhaled noisily, nostrils flaring.
"I can be here for this," I said, straining to sound calm. "I can be here the whole time."
"I'm not having my baby here. Didn't Ruth tell you anything?"
"She just asked me to check on you."
"Isn't there a file on me somewhere?"
There was a file, but I hadn't bothered reading it, certain that I already knew everything about Birdie Gradowski.
"I'm planning on the Pioneer Valley Birthing Center," she said. "But I'm not in labor. It's just this rippling thing again." She was rubbing her belly in circles. The rippling, I knew, was fear.
"Sam will help when he gets here," I ventured. Birdie looked as if she would spit.
"Sam takes a Xanax every time he hears the word contraction."
I'd attended fourteen first-time births, and I knew what this was. Birdie was right: she was not yet in labor. She was close enough to giving birth to believe that it would happen; she was no longer seeing it through a filter of romantic gauze. She was thinking, mostly, of gore.
"It's like this sudden claustrophobia," she said.
"We can go somewhere else."
"Like where?" Her eyes burned red and green and she breathed audibly through her mouth.
"Well, my house," I said, "or just for a walk, or something," thinking, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, just come with me. I watched her stand up, one protective hand on her belly. I watched her fumble in one of her drawers for her sunglasses. She rubbed a clot of sunscreen onto her nose. She was stalling, but she was going to come with me.
"Maybe for a little while," she said. Her hand in mine was damp. Her tread on the stairs was heavy under the weight of her swollen body. The bottles of essential oils clicked together in my canvas bag. Olympia, asleep on a battered pillow, barely stirred when she saw us. Good, I thought, we don't have to take the dog when we go.
We made it out to the driveway, then Birdie began to slow down. I, stupid, eager, feeling fully in love with her, began to list all the things we could do: we could walk on the bike path, we could visit the campus greenhouses, we could go to the used bookstore, we could sit and drink iced tea.
"Oh, Nora," she said, voice hoarse, "this isn't a date."
"I know."
She pressed her fist to her mouth, let out a half-muffled sob.
"What are you doing?" she said. "Why did you let me do this? Why did you bring me out here?"
"I didn't bring you," I said, frightened by her pallor and the shakiness of her voice and the burn of her eyes. "Look, never mind, we'll go back inside —"
"You're not in my house," she said, then, correcting herself, "I'm not letting you back in my house."
I gripped my car keys.
"That's fine, Birdie."
"I want you to be really far. As far away from me as you can get." She scratched nervously at her scalp with her turquoise nails. Her wrists were so bony that they seemed in need of protection, as if they would be better off inside plaster casts.
"Relax," I told her, opening the driver's side door. "I'm leaving right now."
I waited until she was safely inside the house.
When I heard something crunch under my wheels as I backed up the driveway, my first thought was that somehow I'd hurt Birdie and the baby. Then I wondered if Sam had returned without my noticing and I'd managed to run right into him. I was shaking when I shifted into park and climbed out.
Under my wheels I found a blue plastic pool, streaked and smeared with red. I sank to my knees and looked for a wounded creature. Nothing. The gravel, warmed by the early-June sun, felt good on my hands. Whose blood is in this pool, I thought, whose blood is this, until I remembered Olympia's tomato-soup bath and understood that the wind had carried the pool out of the yard and left it behind my car. I waited for a rush of relief; you earned relief, I believed, when you didn't hurt someone. But it didn't come, not even after I played the soothing CD in the car, not even after I took the longest route, along the river, idling generously at every crosswalk, in case somebody might come along. It took me only twenty minutes to get home.
Jackie Thomas-Kennedy is a 2014–2016 Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Mechanic | | | | By Lena Dunham | | | |
You're already fifteen minutes late to pick me up. I'm standing in the front hall in my baby-doll dress and prairie boots, pretending to inspect a photograph of my young grandmother releasing a seagull from her sandy hand, when Dad comes in from his office. He scans me up and down. "Boots? It's summer, doll."
I shrug, a shrug that simultaneously says You know nothing and Please rescue me.
"When's the chap due?" He pushes his glasses up on his nose and squeezes the last bit of liquid from his tea bag.
"The chap is fifteen minutes late," I say, like it's nothing, like I'm not convinced you forgot. Got high, fell asleep, had whatever kind of emergency auto mechanics/skate-park hangers-on have. You don't mean to fuck up, but you do, and ever since we met I've been making excuses for you.
"Well, that doesn't bode well," Dad says.
"He had to put his kid to bed," I say. Dad is weirdly OK with this. Your being 31, ten years older than I am. Your being a father. Your driving a refurbished '70s muscle car with a Grateful Dead bear painted on the passenger door. His biggest issue really is timeliness.
"Maybe he got scared?"
"Why would he be scared?" I ask, but I know what he's going to say.
"We live in a big house."
"Yeah, well, it's not like we're rich or anything."
He looks at me like I didn't raise no fool. "We may not be rich, but we look rich, kid. The weekend house, the pool. You're a city slicker, like it or not. So don't come in, rock his world, then disappear." He laughs at his own overblown language. He does that a lot, and my mom always shakes her head, mouth gritted in a half-smile: Well, at least you amuse yourself, Terry.
I know he's just trying to be funny, but I just don't feel very funny right now. I'm not sure where you are and I'm all dressed up like Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan and if I have to wash this makeup off without ever leaving the house I'll feel shame for days, so hurry up and get here already. "This isn't Dirty Dancing, Dad," and with that, you honk your horn and I run toward the screen door.
"Suppose no one cares about shaking the father's hand anymore," Dad says.
"Nope! Nope, they don't." I blow him a kiss just as I turn to you, so it's like the kiss is for you both.
And you are in your long, low car, which I know you're proud of. I'm sort of proud of it too, and I would tell my friends about it but I don't have enough knowledge about automobiles to even begin to explain. It's orange. There's some kind of aggressive, shiny grate across the back.
You're smiling up at me — me, bathed in porch light, warm and a little pink because Dad is picky about which lightbulbs we choose ("Ya gotta set a mood"). Your hair, which is almost blonde during the day and at night the color of a field mouse, is flattened on one side like you've been napping, and I see the place where you taped your glasses back together after Mason hurled them on the ground last week because you wouldn't let him stay up to watch an MMA fight. I wonder if you're relieved to be out tonight. And then I know the answer, because I see that you've already got a beer parked between your knees.
I know it's technically an awful idea to drive with someone who has been, and is currently, drinking. But I can't help it: I trust you. The guys at school drink in secret, out of stupid vintage flasks, or they crush pills up and snort them and deny it even when they're bleeding out of their faces, but you, you pop open a can at the end of the day the way my father sips his tea. You worked hard at the shop, and then with Mason, and you deserve this.
You kiss me on the cheek. "Whatcha been doin'?"
"Like, reading and stuff," I say, in language I know you can understand, although maybe I'm underestimating you. "Getting ready for this seminar I have in the fall. The syllabus is crazy long, so I should start, I guess. You?"
You start the car and drive out of our yard at a speed that will definitely keep my dad from sleeping tonight. "Mason was bein' a little jerk. He wouldn't sleep. He's with my mom now."
"What's his bedtime?" I ask.
You laugh. "You think that's up to me? He's been sleeping in a wetsuit lately."
"A wetsuit? Like the kind you'd scuba dive in?"
"Kids do some crazy shit," you say. "He stays up 'til 2, 3 a.m., taking showers in that fucking wetsuit."
"So when does he wake up?"
"Ten? Eleven?"
I don't press the issue. You're a parent and I am not. I can barely get myself to class in the morning. I usually chew gum instead of brushing my teeth. So I will respect you. And I will respect our differences.
Our differences: they've been the topic of so much discussion since I met you last month, peeking out from under the hood of my dad's car like the antihero of a teen movie I watched until the VHS ate itself. Only in the teen movie you're hot and tan, not pale as cigarette paper with broken glasses and chicken legs. In the teen movie, you make up for your lack of a traditional education with oiled, pulsing pecs. In the teen movie, I wear pearls and a cardigan and have long golden legs sticking out of khaki shorts, not winter clothes on a summer night. But in real life, we're just awkwardly figuring this out.
And so I've talked about our differences with everyone but you. My friends all call you "the mechanic" via email or "townie diiick" if they're feeling less charitable. I tell them you know how to put up drywall. I tell them you used to be a drug addict, but now you have a handle on it. I call you by your given name: Kevin. I say it as many times as I can in a day, enjoying its normalcy. A Kevin? For me?
I like how little you ask of me. Sometimes you laugh at my jokes, but mostly you enjoy whatever we are doing in the moment: walking into the gas station an inch apart from each other to buy your cigarettes, splitting a red apple in half with a plastic knife, walking around the racetrack with our pointer fingers linked, or fucking quietly under the eaves of the barn where my father keeps his rare books.
"Wow, these are pretty dusty," you said that first night. Just facts with you. I showed you my favorite, an old copy of The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright. It's the story of a doll without friends and the trouble she gets into when she meets a gang of misfit bears who don't want what's best for her.
"It's really rare," I told you, "and actually very sad if you know about the author's personal life. Her mom was almost, like, her girlfriend." You don't ask any questions after that, which surprises me, because that's a pretty heavy carrot to dangle.
You open to the dedication page, and holy shit, you're looking at it upside down. I text Emma the next morning, stunned. "Urgent: he either can't read or was too stoned to try."
"Hawt," she texts back and I know she's serious, like maybe if you can't read then there's some extra space reserved in your brain just for casting spells of sexual prowess. There isn't.
The sex we have is cautious and teenage, or what I imagine teenage sex was like since I never had sex as a teenager. You did, which is how you got this dark-eyed son, this Mason, who is now old enough to tell you that he wishes he'd never been born, at least not here and not now.
"What did you tell him?" I asked when you told me the story.
"Join the club, buddy."
We pull into the gas station. "You want anything?" you ask.
"Pinot Grigio," I joke. "Light and dry. Just one glass."
"Cool, I'll check." You don't usually get my jokes, but that only stings when they're bad ones and I have to sit with them alone, like they're the truth of me.
I watch you through the window and it's like a tiny kitchen TV set, you moving through that fluorescent box, fist-bumping the man with the fat pelvis who sells you your lotto cards. You survey the case for what you like to drink and grab a pack of smokes, menthols, pulling off the plastic before you've even finished paying. You're back in the car within two minutes — this is an old ballet for you.
"I got you a wine-cooler thingy. Whatever." You laugh and it makes you cough and it reminds me how unhealthy you look when you're sleeping. "Damn. Fuck this." You pound your aching chest.
"Where to?" I ask and you say maybe the graveyard and I've never hung out in a graveyard for fun and I want to. I try to lock my door, an old habit instilled by Dad when we would drive home from the country through a quiet part of Queens late at night. But I can't seem to find the button and I'm grabbing and pulling at random handles and knobs.
"Quit breakin' stuff," you say, reaching across me like a seatbelt and easily doing what I could not. You do have muscles, just a few, in surprising places.
We barely speak on the drive, just nurse our drinks and then silently smoke a joint you produce from the glove compartment, which means reaching across me again. You don't mind silence and it gives me time to wonder if you'll miss me when I go back for my junior year. You seem to exist in the moment. Your son isn't present for you when he's gone, unless you get an emergency call from your mom saying he's locked himself in the shed again or written MURDER across his toy truck with your old graffiti pens.
We pull into the graveyard and you turn the car off.
"I can't see anything," I whisper. "Can you turn the headlights on?"
"Fine. You're cute enough that I'll wear my battery down for ya." You turn the headlights on and the radio comes on with them. Mazzy Star. Fade into you, I think it's strange you never knew.
"Aw, shit, sorry for the lame music, my cousin was using the car," you say, and I am embarrassed because you don't know that this is actually my favorite song. You're finishing a cigarette, but I push it out of the way and kiss your lips. I feel them curl into a laugh, and for the millionth time this summer I have no idea what's so funny but I persist. We kiss and that weed we smoked is kicking in, the way weed is supposed to kick in and not the way it kicks in at school, when I suddenly become convinced some perfectly harmless sophomore Jew is planning to rape and dismember me. I feel something moving, through my body and into yours and out your fingertips back into me, a circle of energy, and I let myself exist in it, a pleasure outside of sex or food or being told I did a good job, that I always do a good job. It's warm and white, this feeling — and maybe, I think, it's love. Maybe there is a way for us to be together after all — I finish my degree and I get a good job in the city but I spend the weekends here with you and Mason. I pay for his school. I buy us all a house that you take care of. On his vacation breaks you join me in Manhattan and we see musicals and go to MOMA and try to help a dying pigeon in Central Park. It's not traditional but it works for us, because we make the rules and this is our life. We don't need other people to understand, because we don't care. But they will understand. Just like you understand me, understand that I'm not just another girl hoping to get thin enough to have my picture in a magazine as "a curator to watch." You understand, and everyone will be jealous and impressed and you'll age like Sam Shepherd and I'll be Diane Keaton. Mason will stop looking at me like I'm about to administer an injection and he'll start giving those gushy hugs that happy kids do. We'll all be safe.
But I know that's bullshit. There isn't a chance we'll last past the summer, even if we really wanted to. I'll go back to campus and you'll stay here and try to pick up some extra shifts at the track and continue to talk about thinking about moving to Corona, California, where a company called Saleen designs and manufactures high-end specialty sports cars. You'll visit me once at school and it will be a good old-fashioned disaster, with you coked up already by the time you arrive, sweating and twitching at the party my friend has thrown, and my fancy new underpants going to waste because you can't get hard when you're this wired. I won't be mad, just sad for you and how scared you are to leave the three-mile radius around your mother's porch. So when Emma asks how your trip to Providence has been so far you just kick at the ground, your purple skate shoes fresh out of the box.
I'll try to remember all the best times of the summer, like when you failed to teach me to drive stick in the parking lot of the post office at 2 a.m. and you called me Wreck-It Ralph and stopped the car, howling with stoned laughter. We visited the head shop in Torrington so you could buy a glass pipe, and when I admired an iron-on ying-yang patch you bought it and stuck it to my jacket with a Band-Aid from your glove compartment. We drank flat ginger ale on your porch and kissed every time Mason turned away to work on his Lego spacecraft. But they're not enough, these moments. They don't amount to anything larger than themselves, and in a few months when I break up with you over the phone you'll shrug it off like I told you I couldn't go swimming that day. "Ya, seems about right," you'll say, muttering something about your lunch break being over. It's 10 a.m.
The week after we end things your son's mother will come back around, pretending to be clean and sober, and you will be elated to have your little family back together again in the attic of your mother's house. But soon after that she'll overdose in her sister's apartment across town. And I won't know what to say, because that's not the kind of thing that happens in my family, at least not like that. So I will text you simply that I'm sorry and you will just write back, "thanx. This world is fuct."
But tonight it's still August and this kiss feels like someone granted me furlough from my body and we have a handful of nights like these left to enjoy, so maybe we'll discover a new path forward. Maybe all we need is to share one secret, one true glance, and we will understand how we could make this work and keep on working. After all, the night we smoked salvia you told me you believed in horoscopes and had Googled ours and I'm an earth sign so I have the power to ground you. I like that idea, of grounding someone, especially since last week when my dad told me, "Anna-Claire, you're on the edge of becoming a real sinkhole of self-pity."
You pull away from the kiss and from me and look out at the headstones. "I gotta piss," you say, and the spell is broken. I watch you amble toward the hedges by the biggest stone, one that reads ABERNATHY, and all you're thinking about it taking a leak. Not the racetrack. Not Mason. Not me. I can't be with someone who speaks like this, drives like this, lives like this. I just can't.
"Go for it," I say and watch you walk out among the gravestones, past where the headlights shine and toward the unidentifiable. Just before you disappear you throw me a smile and only your teeth are bright. How did they get so straight without braces? Hope returns. Oh, maybe. Just maybe.
Lena Dunham is currently at work on her first story collection, Best and Always, which will be published by Random House. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
From Lena Dunham + Jenni Konner. | | | | | | | |  |  | |
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