Every time I’m offered something with almond, the same promise: You won’t even taste it. It shares this with coconut, another ingredient recommended by its inability to make a goddamned difference. Why not just stop using both? I know people like this. Recommended by their inability to influence. But they are dependable, they fill out the party and are more liked than I, subtle as anchovy. Jesus Christ, what are we all doing?
The floor rushes forth like a hard hug. Sometimes I mistake presence for fondness. Even though those who are absent are normally the ones I love most. Perhaps because so many in my life have said, “I’m here, aren’t I?” when I’ve asked to feel their love.
DINER AT THE END OF THE WORLD
She came to in a red booth, forehead pressed against a linoleum table flecked with mustard-colored sparkles.
Behind her, the sound of a throat being cleared, as if its owner sensed himself being overlooked. A reptile wearing a suit and tie squinted into the glare of a laptop. The room contained two rows of identical booths, each outfitted with a personal jukebox. She used the side dial to flip through music choices. Every song was Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire.”
Copper lamps hung above a wide counter. Beyond the counter, a swinging door. She sensed a stillness on the other side. Empty shelves and an oven. Except for the reptile’s claws tipling against his keyboard, there was no sound in the diner. No staff. She could not see out the fogged windows but knew it was evening. On the other side of the counter, a bank of coffee machines made her stomach growl. Coffee could correct a series of wrongs inside her. The reptile did not look up from his screen.
“It’s serve yourself.” He flicked his eyes toward a shelf of mugs nearby.
She crossed behind the counter and stood in front of the mugs. Each was emblazoned with the name of a state or country, as if collected in gift shops across the world. She chose Spain and pulled the plastic lever, releasing a stream of fragrant coffee. She stirred sugar into the coffee, tried it. Too strong. She added more sugar, poured creamer in and watched the liquid turn beige.
The reptile felt her shadow over him and glared as if she were the sun.
“Do you mind?” she said. “Normally I like being alone but it’s been a strange week.”
“You are the bride?” he said.
“Spooky. How did you know?”
“You’re wearing a wedding dress.” He slid a pile of newspapers away from the tabletop, as if to make her comfortable, which didn’t match the character she had built on his scowling face and lack of eye contact. She sat across from him, blowing on her coffee.
“Do you mind if I ask,” she said, “where we are?”
“Not at all.” He appeared to weigh different tacks. “In a manner of speaking, we are in a diner at the end of the world. But in another manner of speaking, we’re also not. There are many, many worlds, and many diners at the end of each one.”
This sounded reasonable. She wanted to ask which world but worried it was a stupid question. She chided herself for being intimidated by a reptile. She couldn’t be expected to know everything. He had to expect questions. She sipped her coffee and focused on his laptop. “Are you working on a novel?”
He laughed. “I’m a daysleeper. I run a Japanese lifestyle blog,” he said. “Tokyo is thirteen or fourteen hours ahead of America’s East Coast, depending on daylight savings time. When it’s evening here, it’s day there, so I sleep during the day and set my alarm for 7:00 p.m., to wake up when their market opens. I blog tips and advice for the day’s trading, with culture and fashion thrown in.”
“You’re a vampire,” she said.
“So are you, it appears.” His tone was pleasant. She had really gotten him wrong.
“How often do people ask you for tips?” she said.
He braced, in anticipation of her asking for a tip.
“I have no money,” she assured him.
“I wouldn’t be able to help, anyway,” he said. “I deal mostly in futures. Guessing how valuable commodities will be. If people will want rice or gold next year as much as they wanted it this year.”
“You’re a gamb—”
“I’m not a gambler.” He caught her comment on its rise. “People who think of the market as a gamble don’t understand it.”
“I don’t understand the market,” she said. “I can’t even explain the Internet.”
He shrugs. “The Internet is a tapestry that covers the entire world. Billions of people hold its edges. It’s similar to the market.” He pretended to hold a cloth in his hand. “When one person in Australia goes like this”—he “lifted” the fabric then “lowered” it to its original height—“the people in Sweden feel the ripple effect in the market. When someone goes like this over here”—he “yanked” the fabric back—“the people over here feel it. With everyone lifting and yanking, the area in the middle is a sea of waves and flat places and movements and is constantly shifting. And then there are rumors. You hear that people holding the fabric over there are about to drop it. So you want to drop your side. But then they don’t drop it, and then other people you hadn’t anticipated drop theirs. Others pick it up. It is ever changing and impossible to predict. Gambling implies that there is rhyme or reason and those who are able to count fast enough can figure it out. The truth is, the market is influenced by forces impossible to chart. It’s like fashion. It never ends.”
“The Internet is nature,” she said. “Wind that doesn’t begin or end.”
He jerked his chin to the counter, the windows etched in condensation. “There is nothing you can think of that the Internet is not.”
“Are we the Internet?” she said.
His laptop emitted a sound like a tiny wave crashing. A familiar voice broadcast from an overhead speaker. “We’re working on it. You’ll be down in a jiffy.”
The diner tilted to one side. Nausea lurched in her stomach. The diner tilted back, righted itself, but the ground no longer felt solid. She touched her cheek and felt indentations made from the plastic booth, chevron stripes.
“Is this a ship?” she said.
He blinked several times but did not answer. The crashing-wave sounds increased in volume.
“Friend,” she said. “Am I awake?”
A scorpion hissed from the bottom of her cup. She hurled it into the aisle. The overhead voice assured her that James was on his way.
“There’s been a mid-session rally,” the reptile said. “Stay calm.”
The fog crept higher on the windows. The reptile pressed a button on the jukebox and Jerry Lee Lewis sang. She widened her eyes to clear her suddenly misty vision. Sound of foghorn. Sound of bells. She balled her fists and swiped at her eyes and opened them again. The music emanated from within a miles-long expanse of fog, tuned by distance that continued to grow. When will James get here? she wondered. Everything will be okay once he arrives.
She stared backward from a force that was pulling her away no matter how she struggled. “I can’t leave before James gets here.”
“We haven’t reached our lowest numbers,” he said from the end of a long tunnel. “Your grandmother says even though we’ve gotten off the floor, we can always go lower.”
“How do you know my grandmother?” I say, cruel reality waking me.
“You’re fine,” he said. “So kind … I’m gonna tell this world that you’re mine, mine, mine, mine.”
LEAD US NOT ONTO LONG ISLAND
Wake up, my grandmother says.
I regain consciousness in the Inn’s bathroom, a little girl I don’t recognize standing over me, tiny hands clamped on my shoulders. She asks if I’m all right.
I struggle to steady one leg under me then the next. I reassemble in front of the mirror as she gapes. My forehead bears a red welt where the floor slapped me. I riffle through the basket for makeup.
She asks where all the gum went. “The pack was full a minute ago,” she says.
“I ate it. I’m the bride.”
“There’
s another bride here,” she says.
“I’m one of the brides. Are you the other bride’s flower girl?”
She nods.
“Are you having fun dancing?”
“I was,” she says. “But then they asked everyone to come onto the dance floor for a couples dance so my cousin and I were dancing and they said anyone who wasn’t married had to leave. And then anyone who was only married for a day. Then, anyone who was only married for a year. Until only my old aunt and uncle were dancing, and everyone cheered.”
“People who don’t stay married get shamed,” I say.
She nods. “You really like gum, huh?”
“Sure do.”
“Your dress is pretty,” she says, exhibiting an undetected sweetness that makes me regret eating all the gum. “Do you like it?”
“What a thoughtful question,” I say. We examine it in the mirror. “I like how it fits my waist.”
We wash and dry our hands. I follow her into the other banquet hall. As she walks, she reties the bow making a pleasant horizon on the back of her silk dress. Her arms are too short and can’t reach. The bow ends up sagging. I’d help but you don’t touch other people’s children.
The other bride sits on a chair in the center of the dance floor, howling with pleasure as the bridesmaids circle her. The deejay plays a popular song and the other groom beats time on his leg amid a crescent of observers.
The bridesmaids file away to make room for the men who’ve been called to the floor for the garter toss. One of them wags her finger at the groomsmen to say, Be good. The men stand with their hands folded, waiting for their part. The little girl stands to the side, shuffling in time to the music.
I’ve seen dozens of garter tosses and they always produce the same sensation of hollow ritual, cheap lace slid up a stranger’s thigh to tantalize. I return to the banquet hall that applies to me.
* * *
The bridesmaids and I used to make yearly excursions to Atlantic City. On this past trip, bachelorette themed, we stayed a few nights in a casino. Our rooms overlooked the poker tables. We spent three days hungover eating cheap eggs and breakfast meat. Outlet shopping and the beach. Periodic interruptions by husbands and children on the phone. Long after my friends fell asleep every night I watched the dealers dole out chips and cards. Give then clear. When to stick and when to fold. I watched them until I was so tired it looked like they were dealing pearlized eggs, clearing glitter-gates into shimmering decks.
The bridesmaids are girls from high school who were surprised when I asked them to fill important wedding roles. They don’t wear lip gloss anymore. More than half of them had ill-advised marriages in their early twenties out of which they quickly ejected.
On this last trip, everyone secured their belongings into their car trunks by noon on Sunday, apologizing out of the parking lot in reverse. After they left I dragged my suitcase onto the beach and ate a breakfast taco and watched the ocean throw itself around. Pigeon colored. Exhausted and flat, but honest. I thought about second marriages, what my friends call the real ones. They defend indefensible aspects of their slovenly, lucky husbands and stay in yearslong ruts because they cannot fathom two failed marriages. What’s wrong with divorce? Concluding that staying in the thing would be more illness than salve, snipping and cinching it, freeing one to pivot from what is not working and grow stronger in a different direction. If a plant insists on sending energy to its dead flowers, it dies, but it only takes itself down. Humans are not plants; they cannot keep rot to themselves. How dead marriages seep into the soil, dulling everything around them.
A marriage that furnished love and was relieved of its misery at the appropriate time so its participants could go on to love again, isn’t that more of a success?
I sat on that beach after all my friends had gone home and locked eyes with a scuttling seagull. Too intense to be mistaken, I was definitely its subject. We stared at each other until I knew it would be me and this seagull forever, and then do you know what that gorgeous, thrilling, winged heartbreaker, who I’d only just given my love to, had the gall to do?
* * *
The bridesmaids circle me, chanting my name while I do every dance move I can think of.
Across the room, sitting amid abandoned chairs, a man watches us. He wears formal trousers and a tuxedo shirt scissored down the middle. Blood leaks from a cut on his chest. Tom.
SARA SOMETHING
The last time I saw my brother was in an upstate mountain town at his wedding to a girl named Sara Something who I’d caught in no fewer than four lies in the time she dated him:
The time she lied about letting his cat out and Oberon was missing for three days.
The time she said she was going home after the birthday party and I saw pictures of her on social media out at bars.
Every time she said she was clean.
Every time she said my brother was clean.
That was when Tom was doing everything half-heartedly. Dating her, writing, he was even a half-hearted drug user, which turned out to be enough to get him hooked. He told himself this story: He could marry her and if not be happy, belong.
On the morning of their wedding, I watch Sara cross the mountain retreat’s lawn from my second-floor room where I drag an iron over my dress. Her veil bobby-pinned aggressively around her gel-slicked topknot, she appears disturbed, wearing only a slip. The camp is arranged in a friendly L-shape around a lawn on which the invitation encouraged us to bonfire, sing, or “just be.” The day before I’d watched Sara Something’s cousins suck through cigarettes at the picnic tables, a pile of discarded ends hilled by their ankles. Now it supports a phalanx of folding chairs pointed toward an arbor accented with fake flowers.
Though the area is experiencing a heat wave, I wear a sarong to cover my scarring. I’m the only member of our family present. Everyone else has given up on Tom, who didn’t visit me in the hospital or help with our grandmother’s funeral. The decision to attend his wedding came after realizing the geometry of immovable emotion: I’d regret going and not going, equally. No one clings to a brother like a little sister.
From above I watch Sara Something bang on an adjacent room’s door with an open fist. Adrian answers, bare-chested, wearing a towel. He must have arrived during the night. He shuts the door with her inside.
On the cabin television’s lone channel, fly fishermen stand in a river casting golden lines so thin at certain angles they disappear.
Sara Something emerges from Adrian’s room and tears across the lawn. When she reaches the arbor, she yanks one of the flowers out and resticks it farther down. I agree with the new placement.
She jogs the rest of the way to her room and vanishes inside. I hang the dress in the closet as the phone by my bedside rings.
It’s her. “There’s a problem,” she says.
In one of his spectacular displays of poor decision-making, Tom has gone clean. That morning Sara found him puking into the toilet in the cabin they rented for the week.
Sara has fury’s logic. “He considers it a wedding gift. It’s one thing to go clean and another to do it when you have to be suited and reasonable within hours for cocktails. We’re supposed to toast our parents, for Chrissake.”
Tom is in withdrawal and has flushed his stash. Sara Something has decided: someone must find heroin for the groom. She asked one of her cousins she thought might be holding but he’s clean, too. She sounds astounded, as if the world has conspired to chemically unplug in an effort to screw her wedding day.
“Did he think about how stupid it was to go off the day before our wedding?” she says.
“I wouldn’t know about that.” I wonder why she called.
“My cousin says there’s a suburb near the city where we can get what he needs. I can’t go, obviously. They can’t go because I can’t risk my parents finding out. I’m being honest: they hate him.”
Sara Something thinks the first-rate shit she says is justified if preceded by I’m being honest
. One of the fly fishermen plunges into the banks of a churning river, casting his silken webs. I unmute the television to hear the river.
“I understand,” I say. “I really do.”
“They don’t want their daughter to marry a junkie,” she reasons.
“I believe that is the situation my brother was trying to help you avoid.”
“Will you go with Adrian and get him help?”
“Can you please ask my brother to come to the phone?”
“He’s throwing up in the bathroom. He’s like, writhing around.”
I hang up, dress, and secure a few items into a purse. On the lawn near the arbor, Adrian waits, wearing a button-down, jeans, and a blazer. We take his car. Muscles show up through his jeans and shirt. I’m in my younger stage of overfunctioning, so I natter on as he drives. I ask when he got in and he guesses, late. I ask how the drive was and he says, uneventful.
“I thought he was clean,” I say, and he says, “I thought he was, too.”
“Are we going to talk about this?” I say.
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